Slashdot Mirror
Google Public Service Search Makes for Easy Phishing
lisah writes "According to reports at NewsForge this morning, Developer Eric Farraro has discovered a potential hole in Google's Public Search Service that may leave the door wide open for phishing scams. The Public Search Service, designed to allow universities and other non-profit institutions to add Google search capabilities to their websites, provides code that allows website developers to customize the header and footer of the search results page. Handy (and malicious) coders can manipulate the headers and footers to create what looks like a Google sign-in page and then collect the login names and passwords of unsuspecting users." NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Give a man a fish and he can eat for one day, teach a man to phish and he can anoy millions of people for the rest of his (hopfully short) life.
(Sigh) Its all rather depressing realy. After having the same domain and email address for ten years my spam to real mail ratio is about 500:1 and I can find my email address on decade old usenet posts via Google.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
And you find that the google www.google.com/u/gplus doesnt work now. I'll say one thing. They sure are quick. Now they should just put those search results in an IFRAME that you cant change like the adsense code.
People always are looking for new ways to get user/pass from unsuspecting users. The internet is used to hurt the ignorant. I just hope I wont fall into such a good looking trap.
Its google's issue because they are HOSTING it. If they werent hosting the code, then fine. But they are and thats where the problem lies.
Original post
Site in question
It looks like the page has been replaced with a message warning about viruses and spyware. I looked at the page earlier (from Reddit.com) and the login page looked very legit--scary indeed.
If you put in a username and password, he didn't store it but he echoed it back to your browser. Even though he didn't store it, my concern was that the password was still being transmitted via plaintext...
The problem is that usually people can type in the URL from a suspicious looking email and prevent phishing attacks. In this case, typing in the URL took to you precisely the same site. All the anti-phishing advice you've been giving your family and friends would prove useless under these circumstances.
IT'S A TRAP
This is very Google-specific screw-up. It is not like they forgot to change some default setting, it is a specifically designed feature that went wrong.
Google certainly does not do evil, but it is not exactly catching in the rye.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
So how is their exploit any different from a sysadmin changing the DNS table on his server and presenting a page to the internal network that 'looks like google' and even has 'www.google.com/ig' (or a bank, ebay etc)? Isnt this why we have 'trusted websites/verisign etc... ?