Posted by fiej 5 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
Even when I've been able to track down hosts, registrars, etc for scraped duplicates of sites, and report to all and Google, Microsoft Safety Scanner, etc -- nobody acts (or certainly not in any reasonable enough time to be useful).
In one case the scammer was using our own logo served directly from a source we could replace with Cloudflare rewrites. So the hijacked logo became "THIS IS A SCAM SITE" while we replaced the one on production.
Brands and their ordering providers that watch for their site loading under someone else's domain, or for checkout sessions that never reach the real payment provider, are well placed to catch these sites early.
It can be detected if the IT folks look in the right places. I suppose a SCAM ALERT page could be presented to a reverse proxy when discovered.
Excuse me while I go throw up, can’t believe I just recommended that.
In the old days, delivery was limited to pizza, and occasionally Chinese. You'd call the restaurant directly and place the order. The only possible way a scammer would get you is if you called the wrong number. That's why we had the Yellow Pages.
It seems from comments here that Google is a lot less reliable than the Yellow Pages were.
Why are they allowed to direct you to literal scams? Why are they allowed to profit off of literal scams?
This affects the company I work for, who gets called every single day with customer complaints from people who clicked the scam link from a search ad when looking for our site.
Our site has existed for over a decade. There's no justifiable reason that a company who's brand is known by every single grocer or merchant to somehow show up under a literal fly by night scam company pretending to have the same name. It's unacceptable.
My sister got scammed by this exact mechanism just last week.
What could we possibly do to limit the damage from this? Malicious Chrome extensions can also rewrite entire web pages, so if bad actors purchase or infiltrate legitimate extensions, they can also put users at risk.
We are considering continuing work on our own browser, since we could ship certificates to use client-side, but it's a recursive problem since our users would have to get the first trusted version before they could trust updates to it. If they have trouble reaching our site in the first place, through poisoned Google search results, poisoned DNS, and poisoned IP routing, then it is difficult to do this.
[1] https://stateofutopia.com/laws/2/law2/law2.html
Save that page (with curl or wget), you should get this sha256:
BFE524880867A84C9A438A057734B58954B860843BDB5B15C9E4ED70C534126D (updated after I removed a script injection attack).
though if you're reading this comment through a proxied Hacker News clone, someone might rewrite that hash to their version of what they want our law to say.
jummyjonhsanbich
jummyjorsandvotch
Is it just some JS on bad.com shuttling assets from the real site and displaying them on the fake one? Shouldn't the right CORS headers from the real site prevent this?
Is it a real browser running on a server somewhere visiting the real site, and then rendering that output on a <canvas> on the fake site to avoid the browser's built in protections against this kind of thing? And throwing up their own credit card entry form when the time is right?
Maybe the answer's in there somewhere. Too much Claudish to parse through.
So you don't need to worry about CORS from the perspective of the web app, nor need a real browser, because the victim is only ever interacting with the evilsite endpoints.
Certainly there are ways the target site could try to thwart this (i.e. detect unusual request patterns from wherever the proxy server is fetching from; client-side JS to detect the site being hosted on a foreign domain; etc). But at that point it's an arms race.
Either:
- They actually decided to remove one of the most annoying things about the modern web... and replace it with something very similar to tell you that they removed it, or...
- They found some legal justification for getting me to accept their cookies for dismissing the "no cookie banner banner"
Either choice makes me think less of them.
[edit: added extra newlines so bullets showed up correctly]
Then it links to a page which is even more explicit about how little they collect: https://www.infohawk.com/cookies
My point is: they did all the necessary work required (no third party tracking cookies) to NOT HAVE TO show a banner...
... and then they chose to show a banner.