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Oxford Temporarily Blocks Google Docs To Fight Phishing
netbuzz writes "Fed up with phishers using Google Forms to commandeer campus email accounts as spam engines, Oxford University recently blocked access to Google Docs for two-and-a-half hours in what it called an 'extreme action' designed to get the attention of both its users and Google. 'Seeing multiple such incidents the other afternoon tipped things over the edge,' Oxford explains in a blog post. 'We considered these to be exceptional circumstances and felt that the impact on legitimate University business by temporarily suspending access to Google Docs was outweighed by the risks to University business by not taking such action.' The move generated widespread complaints from those affected, as well as criticism from outside network professionals."
As an email system administrator for a Canadian university, we also see Google docs being increasingly used for phishing. We've also noticed Google's response to abuse reports has also improved considerably. If a few people submit an abuse report on a form, it will now usually get suspended in a matter of hours, where it used to take over a day. Unfortunately, those first few hours are the most critical when it comes to reacting to phishing.
Google docs is massively abused for phishing, and there doesn't seem to be much action by Google to prevent that.
If Google paid more attention to preventing or mitigating abuse using their network, or even paid active attention to reports of abuse, people wouldn't have to resort to blocking them.
I, like others, would like to know exactly how Google Docs is used for phishing. I've used Google Docs off and on since it was made available. I can't think of a particular feature that would make it an enticing service to use for phishing.
Can anyone offer an example or offer up an anecdote where they've encountered it?
One of the things our SiteTruth system does is report on major sites that host phishing scams. There are only 34 such sites today. As it has been for several years now, Google is at the top of the list.
Here's the list of all known phishing sites currently hosted by Google.. Scroll down through all that background data about the company to a big block of red "phishtank report (2013-02-01): Phony site reported via PhishTank." lines. Click on the links for a PhishTank report. The raw data comes mostly from PhishTank. Most exploitable hosting services (especially short-URL services) check PhishTank and the APWG list automatically, but not Google.
Google has several vulnerabilities. It's possible to host an attack page not only on Google Sites and Google Docs, but also on Google Spreadsheets. Recently, Google added a new attack vector; there's an open redirector at Google Accounts.
Amusingly, for some, but not all, of these phishing sites, Google's own anti-phishing warning pops up. But the part of Google that generates that blacklist clearly doesn't talk to the part of Google that does hosting.
Here's the oldest phishing site hosted by Google. On line since 2010-12-30. It's one of those "Habbo Coins" phishing pages, probably forgotten by the original attacker, since it forwards to a dead Hotmail account.
When we first started doing this analysis, Google wasn't on the list, because they didn't do hosting. There were about 150 sites listed in 2009. Through improved awareness, nagging and the Anti-Phishing Working Group, we're down to 34 - a few little sites with no clue, ones that just got hit by break-ins, and "bit.ly", which tries to keep up with their abuse problem but is falling behind. MSN, Yahoo, TinyURL, and most of the other big-time victims long ago solved their problems in this area. Google stands alone as a major service with an incompetent abuse department.
I am really just shocked at how stupid people are to fill out a form on Google Docs with their passwords and username. I always recommend that people who fall for really obvious phishing attacks be fired but in this case, you can't fire students.
Linux O Muerte!
Why is this at all google's fault? Why should they have to police google docs in such a fashion? Blame the people who suddenly decided phishing was a good idea.
Because they are providing the tool that is so easily abused by phishers.
It wasn't too long ago that open email relays were very common (and were quite useful), but now they are quickly blacklisted due to spammer abuse even though it's the spammer at fault, not the owner of the email relay.
If I set up a booth outside your house giving away free universal keys that will open every lock in your house, you would probably have a problem with it even if the keys are perfectly legal to sell and have many legitimate uses. Even if it's only the criminals that will use the keys to break into your house, you probably wouldn't want me making it easier for them.
You'd think that with all of the brain-power that Google has, they'd be able to come up with an automatic detection method for these scams that triggers an immediate manual review of suspected sites with a quick takedown - even though Google responds to abuse notifications within a few hours (as opposed to the few days it used to take them), a lot of personal information can be stolen in a few hours.
Read the article. It's not stupid, it's being focussed somewhere else. As the article notes, a senior professor considered a world expert in Aztec culture or hunting Higgs Boson might not be an expert in IT, or focussing closely on IT forms when they are trying to crack a tricky problem in their field.
I like it that you write off Oxford university academics and students as stupid. Mind you, to be fair I don't know where you got your education from ;-)
I work on collaborative academic research projects. Rightly or wrongly some of these use free tools like Google docs for information sharing.across organisations and countries. It might not just be undergrad students but also paid employees not able to access important shared documents.
I'd prefer it we used some better shared work environment but by crickey have you ever tried as a non computing specialist academic to persuade your central IT department that they should use the workspace environment that some other university's IT department wants to use instead of the local preference? Geek fight supreme. None of the IT departments in the different organisations want to back down and use somebody else's preferred option, and if your PhD isn't in Computing they sure aren't going to take your advice... so often academics say "sod the IT departments, let's all just use this free software we all know how to use and bypass the IT departments who aren't interested in supporting collaborations...
You mean the university email system that delivers the malicious email?
I have a crazy idea, tell users not to give personal information out by email. It's that simple.
NEVER give out personal information by email.
The university doesn't control all avenues of email delivery - some people use Yahoo, MSN, and other providers so even if they had a perfect phishing filter, some would still slip through other avenues.
After you've worked in an IT help desk for a while, you'd learn that there is no way to get people to follow a simple "Don't do this because it's unsafe" policy (for one thing, the list of unsafe behaviors is longer than anyone can remember). Try telling your boss (or a tenured professor) "You're an idiot! We told you not to give out personal information on links clicked from an email", and he'll say "But look, this website has our university seal on it, and it said it was from the IT department so I thought it was safe".