I have seen it in multiple websites like Steam or Hackerrank. When I click an external link, it redirects to a new page and gives a warning like,
You are about to visit an external link, proceed with caution
Is it to prevent phishing or is it some kind of pagerank retaining trick?
Related
We have a curriculum site hosted in New Sites and is shared publicly. Anyone that visits the site gets the Google "We're Sorry" page and can't access the website without refreshing the page multiple times. It seems that after you finally get each page to show, future visits are fine. But as they begin to roll this site out to teachers, they need the link to work. This is both via direct link access or clicking the link in an email. Happens in Chrome and Firefox so far from testing.
I've never seen this happen with Google Sites. There is nothing specific on the page that is unsafe, no insecure embeds (just images and links to google drive docs).
I used https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search to test and it comes back safe.
Per request I am going to include screenshots from the Network tab. However I can no longer replicate this issue on my network or machines, but many teachers are still reporting the issue so trying to get screenshots from them. In this first one, logimpressions is blocked for them but the site loaded - this is most likely caused by having uBlock enabled.
My webmaster has an online store on a site with ssl that i would like to feature on my site. He says this could be done with an iframe. Are there any security risks in using an iframe for this shop, in example a middle man attack? Or is this safe for any customers using it because the origin is protected?
Although iFrames are, in theory, loaded securely in their own environment, there are several security issues with them including:
They can be used for ClickJacking attacks. For example a site loads another website in an iframe and then floats username and password text boxes on top of the iframe so people think they are typing these into the website in the iframe, when in fact they are not.
It's not easy to see the website the iframe is loading. For example you load a frame of badbank.com and make it look exactly like goodbank.com. The user has no idea which domain has loaded as there is no address bar nor green padlock.
In general it's suggested for websites to prevent framing using X-Frame-Options or Content Security Policy HTTP Headers to prevent framing.
For sites like you doing the framing (rather than being framed) you are therefore risking your users. So if your site is hacked then this might lead to above issues. Additionally I've worked on a couple of sites where framing suddenly broke when the framed site prevent it from being framed anymore using above headers. Which looks bad on your site.
Finally framing breaks some of the fundamental ways of using the web (e.g. Back button).
All in all I would caution against iFrames.
I am working on a website related to physically/psychologically abused person.
There is an emergency exit button available all time so the user can click on it before the "aggressive" person enter the room where the computer is located.
When the user click on the emergency button, the user is automatically redirected to Google with a query like "cooking apple pie" (this is an example).
Also, we would like to hide our website from the browser history in case the aggressive person check the history of the abused person. I think this cannot be done technically.
At least, can we generate fake browsing history to justify to the aggressive person the time that the user was on our website?
I tried multiple things to simulate a "browsing" like using an iframe or an ajax query to another website but none populate the browser history.
Is this can be done?
Thank you for your input!
I think you may be focusing too much on the browser and computer that you do not control and not enough on the content and the server that you do control. How about taking a different approach? Why not generate the pages for the user on the fly? The links are only good once. If you click on the home button (your escape key) and the aggressive person looks in the history the attempt to access them a second time could be made to display the weather or lottery results or something innocuous, Focus on what you have control over.
Useful Technical Details
Removing/Preventing Back Button Click History
You can allow the user to browse throughout a webpage without building up a history trail on the back button by having them click exclusively on javascript: links. This would still not remove any of the visited websites from their full browser history, so it's not a full solution.
Here's an example HTML JavaScript link:
CLICK HERE TO ESCAPE!
If this is acceptable, you could build an inoffensive homepage from which the user could access the site that would use JavaScript to send them to the real website. Every link on that new website would have to be a javascript link. Disadvantages of this would be that they would no longer be able to use the back button to navigate and that JavaScript is 100% required for the site to function.
Sanitized History
Make sure you have inoffensive titles and icons for any pages in the site so if the user does not delete their browser history they will not grab the attention of the third party.
Preventing Access to Protected Content
One option you have is to disguise your website as something else by having the user log in before they are allowed to access any of the content. You could save their session/login data in such a way that it is cleared if they hit an escape button it is erased or reset. As part of the login page, you could give users an alternate password to type in that would redirect them to fake content if their abuser becomes suspicious enough to demand they log in.
The session/login information should never save between browser sessions and always have a short expiration period, to further reduce the chances of the abuser gaining access to the website.
Disguising the Site
Considerations
If you choose to disguise the site either on the homepage or behind a "fake" login, be very careful to choose something that makes sense and would not arouse suspicion or interest. You don't want the fake page to be some sort of game or anything that might pique the third party's interest.
You also don't want it to look so boring or mundane that the original user would be hard-pressed to explain their possibly frequent visits. It shouldn't be anything so specific that the third party would think twice about the original user visiting it though. For example, it might be suspicious if someone who does not enjoy the great outdoors were to be visiting a page on mountain biking.
It also can't do something like just redirect them to Google without explaining the fact that they had to log in to access it.
General Advice
Private Browsing
Multiple sources have suggested either educating your target audience in how to use IE's InPrivate Browsing mode, Firefox's Private Browsing mode, or Chrome's Incognito mode.
There unfortunately does not appear to be a way to prevent the browser from keeping the current page in its browsing history through JavaScript. It's possible there might be some sort of plug-in or third-party control which would enable this, but it's probably just easier to get your users to use a private browsing mode.
Clearing History
Clearing a user's web history would not be possible since browsers restrict websites from accessing or altering data on the user's computer directly. Since the user's browser history is part of this data it would be a security issue if any website could clear the history.
You should provide instructions to your users for pruning or clearing their browser history, whether on the website itself before they enter, or through whatever resource you showed them how to access your website.
Generating a Fake History
If you need to generate a fake list of visited websites, you can always create new tabs/windows for the users (or possibly iframes) at timed intervals with JavaScript, but the user would have to disable their popup blocker for this to take effect.
Further Reading
Here is a helpful article on creating a useful Quick Disguised Exit From A Website. This forum thread that I found it on also had some useful information, but it's likely you've already seen it.
At least, can we generate fake browsing history to justify to the aggressive person the time that the user was on our website?
Have you cosidered turning it around?
What if technically all your pages and its content are about something else. So it is the content you want to hide that's loaded in a special way, making it easier for you to avoid having it in the browser history.
So then it becomes about knowing when to load/show the special content.
Above said, it's very important what #Frédéric Hamidi said:
Just keep in mind that if the "aggressive" person has control over that computer or the network, nothing can really prevent him/her from installing loggers on the machine or analyzing network traffic.
IE's InPrivate Browsing mode, Firefox's Private Browsing mode, and Chrome's Incognito mode
I would recommend this to prevent the abuser from finding the secret site in the browsing history.
Also, opening a social networking site and letting the browsing history collect that would be an excellent and believable excuse for the time spent on the computer.
I am running a website based on php on a server run by a large host. My goal is very simple. Include link on my site to google search where I dynamically give the search term.
Starting with the url that appears in the address bar, I've narrowed the syntax down to
http://www.google.com/search?q=test
This works when I type it into the address bar. However, when I launch from the server, it redirects to:
www.google.com/webhp...lots of characters
There are references on the web to webhp being related to a virus but I'm pretty sure my host does not have any viruses on its servers.
Does anyone know proper way to launch simple google search from a link? Is a straight link forbidden? I am Willing to use JS to push link to client if necessary (which I use for google maps at Google's recommendation due to usage limits) but want to keep things as simple as possible. This link is just to save people a few clicks.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Simply use the urlencode Method
<?php
echo '<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=', urlencode($userinput), '">';
?>
If you wish to do it with Javascript the answer is here: Encode URL in JavaScript?
Try to track down the "Url Rewriting", I think its a virus you need to remove: http://www.ehow.com/how_8728291_rid-webhp.html
WebHP is a computer virus that automatically sets your homepage to a
fake Google site, known as Google.com/WebHP. This virus will also
randomly open windows or tabs to load this website, as well as
generate pop-ups and fake errors. Also installed with this virus is a
rootkit which can disable your PC's firewall and other methods of
security. If left untreated, the WebHP virus allows hackers to
remotely access your computer and steal personal information, such as
credit card numbers and email passwords.
We have been hounded by an issue in our websites because web protection facility pages like ones from Norton keep on telling certain visitors in certain browsers that our websites are potential risks because we link to a certain http://something.abnormal.com/ (sample URL only).
I've been trying to scour the site page by page, to no avail.
My question, do you know any site that would be able to "crawl" into our website's pages and then check if any text, image, whatever in them links to the abnormal URL that keeps on bugging.
Thanks so much! :)
What you want is a 'spider' application. I use the spider in 'Burp Suite' but there are a range of free, cheap and expensive ones.
The good thing about Burp is you can get it to spider the entire site and then look at every page for whatever you want, whether it be something to match a regex or dynamic content etc.
If your websites consist of a small amount of static content pages, I would use wget to download all pages (ignoring images)
wget -r -np -R gif,jpg,png http://www.example.com
and then use a text search for the suspicious url on the result. If your websites are more complex, httrack might be easier to configure for a text-only download.