Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google

iritant writes "As we were discussing, Gran Paradiso — the latest version of Firefox — is nearing release. Gran Paradiso includes a form of malware protection that checks every URL against a known list of sites. It does so by sending each URL to Google. In other words, if people enable this feature, they get some malware protection, and Google gets a wealth of information about which sites are popular (or, for that matter, which sites should be checked for malware). Fair deal? Not to worry — the feature is disabled by default."

And Google does it again!

Does anybody remember Google Web Accelerator? This also came out with the 'selling point' that it would help the customer:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/04/2223238&tid=217 [slashdot.org]

Google has your mail. They have your searches. Now they are going for your browsing history.

Add it all together and you have a lot of business intelligence. Time to target consumers and influence opinions?

Smart yes, but still quite scary.

What information are they going to collect next? What are they doing with all the information that they are already collecting?

Re:And Google does it again!

This isn't news. ANY anti-phishing tool that checks to see if a page is a phishing site is going to have to send it SOMEWHERE... or did you think that they were just going to be able to magically download a tiny file on your computer that would just 'know' all the phishing sites?

They all do this, which is why I don't use them. Some common sense will tell you if a site is phishing. If you try to go to a bank website and get http://bank-0-am3rika.tv/l0g0n [bank-0-am3rika.tv], then you might want to reconsider putting in your username and password.

Silly sensationalism. nothing more.

Re:And Google does it again!

How about http://www.bankofarnerica.com/ [bankofarnerica.com]?

Fixed that for you.

I bet we wouldn't have half the problems we do now if people just stopped automatically trusting everything they see.

Re:Fixed that for you.

I bet we wouldn't have half the problems we do now if we just stopped having people.

Re:Fixed that for you.

I bet we wouldn't have half the problems we do now if we just stopped

Re:Fixed that for you.

I bet we wouldn't have half the problems we do now if we were just.

Re:Fixed that for you.

I bet.

Re:And Google does it again!

It would also help if fonts were designed a bit better. D A R N and D A M are easy to mistake in a LOT of lowercase fonts if you don't space them out: - darn dam darn dam,

Re:And Google does it again!

Here in Brazil, Petrobras gasoline stations have the brand BR over a green and yellow pair of stripes. And then somebody had the idea of branding their gasoline stations 13R, using a font almost impossible to tell the differrence between BR and 13R. And of course this 13R stations sell very low quality fuel...

But you don't need to believe me, you can believe your own eyes. This [uol.com.br] is the 13R station and This [unetral.com.br] is a real BR station.

Re:And Google does it again!

That is precisely why I avoid Arial and its ilk whenever possible.

Re:And Google does it again!

Ah, you mean the way it already works [mozilla.com], then? Good idea!

Re:And Google does it again!

With the site URL, Google will know the server and exact page.

With only the IP address, they would only know the server.

And given that most of these phishing sites seemed to be an PC on a broadband connection (botnet?), they only really need to know the IP address.

Re:And Google does it again!

Also, they can already collect some of (if not a lot of) your browsing history by checking the IP making requests to Google Adwords, if I'm not mistaken.

Re:And Google does it again!

I know you're trolling, but GP ask an interesting (if somewhat reactionary) question:

What are they doing with all the information that they are already collecting?

Are there answers to his question in the EULAs? Should we pay careful attention to Terms of Service and Privacy Policies before agreeing to the terms? I think so. Even the "do no evil" guys can do evil and call it good.

Does a master list exist?

My thought would be if a master list exists for someone to put up a master site that does not keep up with the information, and put a patch into Firefox to have it pull from this site...

There is no secret to why Mozilla Firefox wants this feature. I suspect Google has agreed to pay then for the feature to be in Firefox, as I would think this data would be quite lucrative....

Re:Does a master list exist?

By default firefox does not send URLs to google. It downloads a static list from google periodically, and checks against that.

Re:Does a master list exist?

In firefox 2.0, if you look in preferences > security, there are two options for antiphishing. One is the "use a downloaded list" option, and the other is the "check by asking google for each site I visit". But the word google is a dropdown box - it appears that there will eventually be more choices, but they haven't made deals with (or been offered money from, depending on how cynical you are) other providers yet.

Not new.

This is a non-story. The ability to ask google about phishing has existed since 2.0, and was disabled then as well. Not that telling google every site you visit is a good thing.

Re:Not new.

Is this any worse than IE7, which sends the same to M$? At least Google servers are likely to respond in a more chipper fashion than M$'s, which at times have been noticeably slow, such that I turned AntiPhishing off for some newbies I'd activated it for

No kidding

The article is about as informative as one of those "Your computer is broadcasting an IP Address!" banners.

For the record:

• As you point out, Firefox 2 already does this, and it's disabled by default.
• IE7 does the same thing with servers at Microsoft. Disabled by default, but strongly encourages you to turn it on.
• Opera 9 does the same thing with servers at Opera. Enabled by default, IIRC, but can be turned off.
• Isn't Safari 3 supposed to get similar anti-phishing capabilities?

Re:Not new.

Firefox 2 indeed has such a setting.
[ ] Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery
      (*) Check using a downloaded list of suspected sites
      ( ) Check by asking [Google] about each site I visit

And heck, when I try to enable Check by asking Google... a window asking me to accept or reject the terms of service comes up! It says exactly this:
"If you choose to check with Google about each site you visit, Google will receive the URLs of pages you visit for evaluation. When you click to accept, reject, or close the warning message that Phishing Protection gives you about a suspicious page, Google will log your action and the URL of the page. Google will receive standard log information, including a cookie, as part of this process. Google will not associate the information that Phishing Protection logs with other personal information about you. However, it is possible that a URL sent to Google may itself contain personal information. Please see the Google Privacy Policy for more information."
With two choices, accept or reject the terms of service, or I can cancel and it leaves it on my previous setting.

I wonder if Firefox 3 does the same, eh?

Uhh, how ELSE are you going to do this?

A "blacklist" of phishing sites needs to be stored somewhere, and you need to be able to do queries against it.

It changes too fast, and is too large, for it to be stored locally.

So SOMEBODY needs to provide a database interface to it, and unless you are willing to tolerate the voodoo cryptography and serious performance penalty to do privacy-preserving searches, how else is this supposed to be done?

Re:Uhh, how ELSE are you going to do this?

You could do it by providing a bloom filter the browser, and then when there is a match, the browser could download a certain subset of the blacklist to verify that the match is not a false positive.

Why the concern?

Why is everyone so concerned about a company having their URL history? I mean, they already have your searches(google), your email(gmail) and your documents(google docs), what does it matter?

What will this mean? Probably that google will continue to improve their search engines, their advertising programs and other services, and they will all stay free.

Damn, go smoke some more pot, your not paranoid enough.

The concern.

Why is everyone so concerned about a company having their URL history? I mean, they already have your searches(google), your email(gmail) and your documents(google docs), what does it matter?

Because it's another thing the authorities can subpoena -- or just take, without all that messy paperwork -- and comb through to find things to go after you with.

The way the laws are these days, even if you're Mother Teresa, you're probably doing something illegal, even if you don't think of it as illegal or even realize it. (Ever downloaded VLC or Handbrake? Bought discount smokes? Played a little online poker? Bought something without paying your state's sales tax?) Sure, the FBI normally has bigger fish to fry than you and me, but there's no reason that'll always be the case. The tools that are used for terrorism now will be used for narcotics tomorrow, and copyright enforcement the day after that, and eventually it'll trickle down until it's being used against something you're doing. And information compiled in databases has a tendency to stick around (at least, when it's not being misplaced or stolen). Your browsing habits today could come back to seriously haunt you in a decade or two.

And it's not just the government that you have to worry about, or Google's official policy as a corporation. You also have to consider how much the people who actually deal with this data are paid. How much would it cost to get one of them to give someone malicious access to the database? A whole lot less than the database would be worth, I suspect. Even if you're not doing anything illegal (which, again, I doubt; most people break a half-dozen laws before they get to work in the morning), you're a rare person if there's not something going on in your life that you'd prefer to keep private. Medical conditions, sexual preferences ... it all sounds like good opportunities for extortion to me.

There aren't really any analogues in the pre-computer world to the size and scope of databases like Google's, in terms of both the breadth and depth of information it could contain on individuals. This is not something that we have much societal experience with, and the limited track record we do have is decidedly mixed. It's not especially paranoid to want to take a "wait and see" approach.

Already there

It's already in the version of Firefox I'm using, 2.0.0.6 downloaded directly from Mozilla's web site. In fact you've got the choice to enable it or leave it disabled, and if you enable it you've got the choice between downloading a list and doing the check internally or checking each URL interactively with a service (currently Google's the only one in the list, but more could easily be added).

Re:Already there

Because http://thief.com/login.html [thief.com] and http://thief.com/Login.html [thief.com] both hash to radically different values, but both have in the plaintext a characteristic fingerprint of a phishing attempt. A service that gets the plaintext can trivially identify both, but a service that only gets a hash would be fooled by the second if it only had seen the first before.

Oh my GOD!

Google are going to find out what websites are popular. That's information that they simply couldn't otherwise find out unless they ... oooh ... operated the world's most popular search engine.

Everybody panic!

the unarticle...

Breaking news: Cheese gives you cancer!!

Oh wait, no it doesn't... You might still get cancer though...

Really a fair deal?

Fair deal? Not to worry -- the feature is disabled by default."

But does the "enable" interface inform the user that Google gets their browsing history as a side-effect of providing the blacklist?

Re:Really a fair deal?

Actually, it does explain it pretty well on FF2. If they changed that it would be news.

Re:Really a fair deal?

Actually, it does explain it pretty well on FF2. If they changed that it would be news.

FYI, here's the text in the popup for Firefox 2.0.0.7:

If you choose to check with Google about each site you visit, Google will receive the URLs [google.com] of pages you visit for evaluation. When you click to accept, reject, or close the warning message that Phishing Protection gives you about a suspicious page, Google will log your action and the URL of the page. Google will receive standard log information [google.com], including a cookie, as part of this process. Google will not associate the information that Phishing Protection logs with other personal information about you. However, it is possible that a URL sent to Google may itself contain personal information. Please see the Google Privacy Policy [google.com] for more information.

Salt won't help you.

Salt helps for things like passwords, where two users with the same password will have it appear differently in the password file.

It makes no sense here. It would prevent a third-party from intercepting your browsing history -- but then, they can do that anyway, by simply being your ISP.

But if Google has the list of malware sites, obviously they know that foo.com resolves to a particular hash (with a particular salt). The only way this could possibly work is if Google stored a separate list for each user, each with its own salt, which would still require you trusting Google to be doing this and not to be keeping a mapping of hash+salt -> website.

There is no way hashes can solve this problem. The only solution is to either be smart, so you don't need a blacklist, or to download the entire blacklist periodically, which is an option, but not everyone likes it.

Re:Oh joy.

The people who have no idea about about extensions and plugins(the average user), are the people who want the anti-fishing features. Being the more advanced user, it is far easier for you to turn it off than it is for the average user to seek, install, and maintain(update) a plugin.

I would agree that it is annoying for me as well though - I do not need the help of the browser to ward off phishing, especially at the cost of a performance hit. That said, Firefox is not a pet project of the geek world anymore. FF is aggressively seeking the mind and market share of the everyday user, so they must produce a product those users want. Outside of security, what is the real benefit of abandoning IE6 and more importantly IE7? Pages rendering correctly/standard compliance is not an issue with the average user, not in the least. So that only really leaves security, interface/usability, and I suppose can throw in the great extension selection as a motivator to switch as well. This is a move in the direction of better security to offer its users who value it.

Clueless users don't change defaults

It seems to me that the users who most need anti-phishing protection are the ones least likely to change their defaults.

Did I miss the memo?

Is this tin foil hat day or what? This isn't a new feature in FF3, it's already in FF2.

Wait, maybe it's sending server dumps and some developer said "if you don't like it, fork it." That must be it.

Do we get a "this is a non-story" correction to this post too?

Re:Did I miss the memo?

The difference appears to be that while FF2 periodically downloads a list from google, FF3 uploads every URL you visit.

The feature itself may not be new, but the implementation certainly seems to be.

Wow, just wow...

This is a *really* bad submission. It's wrong on so many fronts.

1. As others have pointed out, there's nothing innately wrong with using Google for antiphishing. They have a large userbase, and can easily detect a mass of users flocking to a really sketchy site. Would it be a huge deal if they plugged into PhishTank [phishtank.com]?
2. The submission does reflect this, but the feature isn't on by default. Instead, Firefox appears to use a static master black list that it redownloads periodically.
3. I can't trigger it now, but I'm pretty sure that you're asked to confirm when you select Google that you're aware of the URL sending and other various privacy implications. The user will not be uninformed when they make this choice
4. The feature is already present in Firefox 2. It is not new to Firefox 3. It's been well publicized before, and there haven't been any major problems since.

This is a pretty stupid low to go for some anti-Google hits.

We're plumbing the depths of journalism today

I am legitimately not trying to troll here.

Could Slashdot editors please have a group discussion about accuracy and integrity in journalism? First it was the WordPress piece, that was rightly amended, and now there's this. Both deal with a fear that "someone" is spying on us. Anyone who deals with computer security deals with that fear on a regular basis, but those fears should not be expressed in the journalism: Facts should.

As many have mentioned, this feature can be found in the Firefox 2.0.0.7 security tab under "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery." The summary is flat-out misleading, and contains links to a general page about all Firefox 3 features (which does not mention Google in the slightest), and the entire discussion about Firefox 2 memory leaks, not the relevant posts the author seems to reference.

There literally is no "FA" to "R" in the first place, and the summary is inaccurate, not only in its facts, but because it is summarizing nothing.

This editorial behavior gives Slashdot a bad name, and moves it a step towards the irrelevancy of The National Inquirer. I've been bringing buckets of salt to take with this site in the past weeks, and would like to see these trends reversed.

Please discuss it.

(I've shut off the Karma bonus on this post, it should fly on its own merits. I'm not posting "AC," because if I'm out of line here, I'm willing to pay the price for it.)

--
Toro

Well...

It's kinda hard to verify URL's if you don't compare them to a massive database.

Is anyone surprised? How is it evil? The evil would only come from the data being misused. Obviously they NEED the data, or rather, the dudes running the database need it. That's not the evil part.

Phishing detection by unique URL no longer works.

It's not really enough to just check the URL against some phishing database. The phishing sites now use unique URLs for each phish going out. Some even use unique subdomains. An example is http://onlinesession-949076872.natwest.com.nigy3r.cn.

We've been struggling with this for SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], which, among other things, uses PhishTank's data. Originally, we used PhishTank's online query API, but that required an exact match on the URL, which was useless. Now we download their entire database every few hours and blacklist the entire base domain (what you buy from a domain registrar) if there's a verified, active phishing site anywhere in the domain.

That seems reasonable enough. But there's collateral damage. So, most days, we have AOL, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo blacklisted. That's because those major sites have "open redirectors" - URLs which will redirect to any specified site. For example,

• http://r.aol.com/cgi/redir?http://mgw1.haoyisheng.com/icons/asp.html
  A convenient, easy to use redirection script popular with phishers. Provides a URL that appears to be on AOL, but isn't. Interestingly, AOL treats as spam any email that uses their own redirector URL. [aol.co.uk] So it's only useful for attacking non-AOL users.
• http://login.live.com/logout.srf?ct=1179231565
  &rver=4.0.1532.0&lc=1033&id=64855
  &ru=http:%2F%2Fby117w.bay117.mail.live.com%2Fmail%2Flogout.aspx%3Fredirect%3Dtrue
  %26logouturl%3Dhttp:%2F%2F62.49.9.117:443/HB.onlineserv.cgi/
  The "logout" page for Microsoft Live can be abused, with some effort, to make it appear as if some hostile site is on Microsoft Live. This looks like Microsoft tried "security through obscurity" and failed.
• http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0Je5VTi9_RDDbAA3TJXNyoA;
  _ylu=X3oDMTE2ZXYybGFuBGNvbG8DdwRsA1dTMQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDc3IEdnRpZANpMDIxXzQ3/SIG=15j5u6auo/
  EXP=1140214114/**http://hticketing.com/www.bankofamerica.com/sslencrypt218bit/online_banking/
  A Yahoo redirector URL intended to create the illusion of a Bank of America site. It may be possible to exploit this as a cross site scripting attack. [xssed.com]

These were all active phishing sites an hour or two ago.

Yes, arguably the intelligent user should be able to visually parse the URLs above and realize that they're not really on the sites indicated. Or notice that a redirection took place. But most users don't notice that. Neither do many anti-phishing tools, especially if the attacker combines both techniques described above.

Phishing has reached the point that if you have an open redirector or proxy on your web site, someone will use it to borrow your reputation for their scam. Open redirectors are now like open mail relays - a nice Internet feature that had to be shut down because of exploits.

So fix those open redirectors, people, or expect to be listed as a phishing-friendly site.