Google Safe Browsing missed 84% of confirmed phishing sites
norn-labs.com
norn-labs.com
So how did they narrow it down to that small number? Why these sites specifically?... what's the false positive / negative rate of both approaches? What's even going on?
As for Safe Browsing catching more than 16% it depends on the timeline at the time these attacks are launched it's likely Safe Browsing catches closer to 0% but as the time goes on that number definitely climbs.
the false positive rate is 100%. they just say everything is phishing:
"When we ran the full dataset through the deep scan, it caught every single confirmed phishing site with zero false negatives. The tradeoff is that it flagged all 9 of the legitimate sites in our dataset as suspicious, which is worth it when you're actively investigating a link you don't trust."
Apparently that's not a joke anymore?!
So for my masters' thesis about 6-7 years ago now (sheesh) I proposed some alternative, privacy-preserving methods to help keep users safe with their web browsers: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/7403/
I think Chrome adopted one or two of the ideas. Nowadays the methods might need to be updated especially in a world of LLMs, but regardless, my hope was/is that the industry will refine some of these approaches and ship them.
I don't follow. Even if Google does have the legal right [1], that does not make the censorship less problematic, or morally right. And even if it's hard to make a legislative fix ("You want to ban companies from trying to protect their users from phishing?") [2], that doesn't undo the problems of the current state, or mean we should be silent about it.
[1] This is far from certain, as it could be argued to be tortious interference, abuse of market power, defamation if they call something phishing when it's not.. Then there's the question of jurisdiction..
[2] It's a very common debating tactic to assert that a solution is difficult, to avoid admitting a problem exists.
HN bans users that violate its rules for example. If I were to insult you severely, HN mods have every right to protect you from my speech and censor me by deleting my message and banning me. The threats posed by these malicious sites are far worse than insults on a forum.
Companies like Google are expected by the public and governments alike to protect their users. they would even be entitled to requiring every site a user visits requires an EV cert and age verification enabled if they want. it isn't just their legal right, everyone, not just corporations, has the right to pursue what they feel is the correct way of doing things. Their responsiblity is to their investors first, users second, governmental regimes third and everyone else after that. Your presumed entitlement here is as everyone else.
For #2, I don't recall claiming a solution being difficult (unless you thought banning companies from protecting their users, was somehow a thing I was saying should be done). Matter of fact, I am near incensed that HN users are utterly and shamefully ignorant on harm users suffer. You should be ashamed of your ignorance. Not only this but I've had long debates on HN on similar lines when it came to topics like the play store require developer authentication. It almost makes me wish your freedom of speech was entirely taken away from you so you can have some understanding of the suffering people undergo, and what such measures are trying to prevent. Freedom of speech has never been a right obtained at the expense of harm to others. The moment someone is harmed, you lose your freedom of speech, that is the case in a public arena where such laws exist, but even more so under private platforms. But i did say almost! I think you're just used to problems being of a technical nature, where as in this case it is a human threat (crime) problem.
Furthermore, I am constantly disappointed at the sheer dereliction of duty exhibited by HNers when it comes to security. Your product must protect your users by default, there is absolutely no acceptable amount of harm users should experience for the sake of non-users. Site owners have no entitlements to browsers, they only have privileges. Browsers can and do absolutely play gatekeepers to websites.
As far as #1, I have argued tortious interference about Google's practices myself before. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know if this qualifies or not, but can I also claim tortious interference if HN bans me, if I miss out on HN job posts or exposure to the startup scene? can I claim defamation for being banned on HN wrongfully? is HN abusing it's market power because of the sheer number of silicon valley types that aggregate on this site? And I suspect you're not a lawyer either, because jurisdiction is a concept that applies to a judicial body (hence: juris), Google is not a judicial body, and they're not handing out a judicial sentence.
I wonder, are you aware of the CA/B forum? hmm..
The fact is, a browser is a software used to access network resources. Part of that feature set, as advertised explicitly to users, is that it will make attempts to keep their access to the network safe and secure. In other words, all of your claims of entitlement are nullified by the simple fact that the "censorship" is an advertised feature, one that not only most browser users use, but it is an opt-out-able optional feature. Not only that, there is always an option to click through the safebrowsing warning and visit the site anyways.
Both from a moral and legal perspective, I challenge you to make yourself liable to all damages people suffer as a result of not having safebrowsing enabled. Insure them free of charge. Next thing I know you'll be claiming enterprise networks shouldn't "censor" either, or better yet, they can but people who can't afford multi-million-dollar firewalls shouldn't be protected for the sake of access you feel entitled to.
As far as libel, simply being incorrect doesn't make it libel, it needs to be intentional. so long as they can back up the reasonable cause of your site making it on their list, it isn't libel. Just same as your IP can land on their lists and gmail will refuse to accept email from you (just same as every public email provider).
Freedom of speech is not freedom of access, both morally and legally. You dilute actual freedoms when you try to abuse them to gain advantages like this. It is important to understand when being able to do something is a right versus a privilege. It is also important to solve the root cause of problems, even though I disagree with you on this topic, Google's monopoly is a big problem, as is Microsoft's and other companies, but your solution being "there shouldn't be a solution" is (I'd dare say) morally objectionable and abhorrent considering the types of harm people suffer as a result. Perhaps appeals to block lists could have a more legally regulated process? But there are more pressing issues like payment processors banning merchants and users alike all the same (worse than browsers than site in terms of impact?), and not a single government would dare claim that is out of line, let along regulate it. The right of companies to do business how they want is highly protected in free market economies, and something like Chrome isn't even a paid product or service to where you can have a commercial or contractual claim over it.
Since this is a long comment, I'll add this finally to it: If you seriously think Google cant' block arbitrary sites on its free software and service, then by that logic users should also have entitlements for bans on sites like HN, and even on things like your open source project, you can't just not accept pull requests or ignore them, if it is affecting a user and they're relying on it, your features preventing them from doing things is tortious interference. claiming negative things about pull requests is libel.
No, the 1st amendment of the US constitution is a legal right. Free speech in general is a much broader concept, not limited to its legal implementation.
> For #2, I don't recall claiming a solution being difficult
You didn't, but it is how these discussions usually develop, and I thought of saving some time. And indeed that's how it went.
Free speech in general is a legal concept. rights in general are not moral concepts, when you say you have a right to do something, it is always in the context of a rules based framework. When you say something is right (same word, different meaning) or wrong, that is morality. Speech can be right or wrong. prohibiting someone from speaking can also be right or wrong, but it isn't called "freedom of speech" or "censorship". If you can't articulate why something is morally wrong without referring to a right under some rule based framework, then you're not talking about morality, you're talking about not liking some rule.
When you are in someone's house, they have the right to decide what you can talk about or not talk about, because it is their home and your presence there is a privilege. Replace home with business, and then replace business with a free product that you're not even paying for and that's this situation.
"I don't like it" is not a moral reasoning. You need to be able to articulate why something is immoral if you're going to use morality as a reason. Similarly, you need to explain what specific laws grant you an entitlement if you feel like a legal entitlement is violated.
And then replace business with country and society that enables that business' existence, and in whose sovereign land that business is located (i.e. in whose house it is), and that's still this situation.
> Free speech in general is a legal concept.
So if someone says "free speech", you just have no idea whatsoever what they're talking about, until they also tell you which country/jurisdiction they're talking about, do you?
And I didn't make a moral argument - I said that there is a moral (not just legal) argument to be made. I don't have the time or inclination to walk you through why free expression is desirable, or why letting a handful of giant entities crush speech and smaller businesses is undesirable. If you need that explained to you, I don't think we'll see eye to eye no matter how long we debate.
Yes, so it is a legal construct then? countries and societies generally exist under the rule of law. In the US, both legally and socially, we've decided to accept a free-market capitalist way. Under that social agreement, both individuals and companies have certain rights and entitlements over their products and services.
Under a more universal moral regime, if you have a good reason to believe someone might come in harms way, you have an obligation to do something about it so long as it is within your means to do. Preventing others from coming into harm supersedes the presumed entitlements of third parties. In this case, Google is nice enough to let users disable GSB or bypass GSB warnings. When a certificate for a website expires for example, similar to GSB every browser shows a warning. almost every single time, the site isn't compromised and there is no MITM attack happening, but we accept that is the best course of action, I don't see you protesting that because you understand it is the right thing to do. But in this case you just don't like GSB and you're looking for some moral ground to stand on because no other ground will let you.
> So if someone says "free speech", you just have no idea whatsoever what they're talking about, until they also tell you which country/jurisdiction they're talking about, do you?
You just said it isn't a legal concept, so why does that matter? But context does matter, in this case we're on a US based website talking about a US based company.
> why free expression is desirable, or why letting a handful of giant entities crush speech and smaller businesses is undesirable.
aha! you don't need to walk me through anything, but I think you confuse what is desirable and undesirable with what is moral and immoral. for desirable and undesirable, you use the law to enact your preferences. your desires however have no bearing on morality.
I don't think we'll see eye to eye either, but because I suspect our understand of morality and the rule of law is not aligned.
Otherwise this becomes just another tool for Google to wall in the subset of the internet they like.
hxxps://r7ouhcqzdgae76-fsc0fydmbecefrap.z03.azurefd.net/new2/?utm_medium=paid&utm_source=fb&utm_id=6900429311725&utm_content=6900429312725&utm_t erm=6900429314125&utm_campaign=6900429311725
The "extension" did a "scan". {"url":"https://r7ouhcqzdgae76-fsc0fydmbecefrap.z03.azurefd.net/new2..."}
response: {"classification":"clean"}
great work?
If I click "Deep scan".. I see a screenshot blob being sent over.. response: { "classification": "phish", "reasons": [ "Our system has previously flagged this webpage as malicious." ] }
So if the site were already flagged, why does the "light" scan not show that?
I report all (manually verified) phishing sites I get spam for to Safe Browsing, then automatically check the listing status daily, and re-report every week if it's still not blacklisted. Usually, takedown by hosters is faster. Phishing sites that stay up long enough often go for 3-4 months before Google finally deems it apt to block them. I think the entire Safe Browsing team consists of one overworked, underpaid intern.
Compare this to Microsoft Defender. The time it takes for a site I report there to get blocked is usually measured in hours, not weeks. This is one thing MS actually seems to be running decently.
Huh? Does this mean it just flagged everything as suspicious?
"The tradeoff is that it flagged all 9 of the legitimate sites in our dataset as suspicious, which is worth it when you're actively investigating a link you don't trust."
so, you dont really need the scanning product at all. if you just assume every website is a phishing website, you will have the same performance as the scanner!
They have a table "AUTOMATIC SCAN RESULTS (263 URLS)" that sort of presents this information. Of the 9 sites that were negatives, they say they incorrectly flagged 6 as phishing.
With a false positive rate of 66%, it's not surprising they were able to drive down their false negative rate. Also, the test set of 254 phishing sites with 9 legitimate ones is a strange choice.
(Or maybe they need to work on how they present data in tables; tl;dr the supporting text.)
In other words, you can get these numbers if your deep scan filter is isSuspicious() { return true; }.
(‘return true’ is just a very optimized neural network after all!)
> The tradeoff is that it flagged all 9 of the legitimate sites in our dataset as suspicious
So what's the point of doing all of this if there isn't some kind of corresponding education on responsible computer use? There needs to be some personal responsibility here, you can't protect people against everything.
...so it has a false positive rate of 67%? On a ridiculously small dataset?
You don’t just leave all your ports open on the firewall and only close the ones exploited. You default deny and only allow the bare minimum you need in.
The fact that Safe Browsing even works is already good enough.
How is this serious? This is a marketing slop. If the title isn't enough indicator, the ending should be:
> If you're interested in trying Muninn, it's available as a Chrome extension. We're in an early phase and would genuinely appreciate feedback from anyone willing to give it a shot. And if you run across phishing in the wild, consider submitting it to Yggdrasil so the data can help protect others.
How about GSB stopped 16% of phishing sites? that's still huge.
“Tylenol stops headaches in 16% of people” - it’s huge, right? That’s millions of people we’re talking about.
Would you use it?
I don't get why there is such a lack of critical thinking on this topic here.
> ... automatic scan is optimized for precision (keeping false alarms low...
really?
> When we ran the full dataset through the deep scan, ... it flagged all 9 of the legitimate sites in our dataset as suspicious
lol
The biggest factor here is the false-positive cliff. Google Safe Browsing is the default safety net for billions of clients across Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. If GSB’s false-positive rate ticks up by even a fraction of a percent, they end up accidentally nuking legitimate small businesses, SaaS platforms, or municipal portals off the internet. Because of that massive blast radius, GSB fundamentally has to be deeply conservative. A boutique security vendor, on the other hand, can afford to be highly aggressive because an over-block in a corporate environment just results in a routine IT support ticket.
You also have to factor in the ephemeral nature of modern phishing infrastructure and basic selection bias. Threat actors heavily rely on automated DGAs and compromised hosts where the time-to-live for a payload is measured in hours, if not minutes. If a specialized vendor detects a zero-day phishing link at 10:00 AM, and GSB hasn't confidently propagated a global block to billions of edge clients by 10:15 AM, the vendor scores it as a "miss." Add in the fact that vendors naturally test against the specific subset of threats their proprietary engines are tuned to find, and that 84% number starts to make a lot more sense as a top-of-funnel marketing metric rather than a scientific baseline.
None of this is to say GSB is perfect right now. It has absolutely struggled to keep up with the recent explosion of automated, highly targeted spear-phishing and MFA-bypass proxy kits. But we should read this report for what it really is: a smart marketing push by a security vendor trying to sell a product, not a sign that the internet's baseline immune system is totally broken.
Am I missing something or is that a 66%/100% False Positive Rate on legitimate Sites?
If GSB would have that ratio, it would be absolute unusable.. So comparing these two is absolutely wrong...
Yeah. "Here's a blog post with some casually collected numbers about our product [...] It turns out that it's great!" is sorta boring.
But couple that with a headline framed as "Google [...] Bad" and straight to the top of the HN front page it goes!
Where I'd push back is on what this means for the average person. Most people have no protection against phishing beyond what their email provider and browser give them. If that protection is fundamentally reactive, catching threats hours or days after they go live, that's a real limitation worth talking about honestly. The 84% number isn't meant to say GSB is broken. It's meant to say there's a gap, and that gap has consequences for real users regardless of the engineering reasons behind it.
On the marketing angle, we aren't currently selling anything. The extension is free and so is submitting URLs for verification. We recognize it would be disingenuous to say we never will, but at the very least the data and the ability to check URLs (similar to PhishTank before they closed registration) will always be free. The dataset is also sourced from public threat intelligence feeds, not a curated set designed to make our tool look good. We think publishing findings like this is valuable even if you set aside everything about our tools.
In what way is it valuable?
I've seen this before in the ip blocklist space... if you're layering up firewall rules, you're bound to see the higher priority layers more often.
That doesn't mean the other layers suck, security isn't always an A or B situation...
On the other hand, I don't know how I feel about how GSB is implemented... you're telling google every website you go to, but chances are the site already has google analytics or SSO...