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Google has been caught hosting a malicious ad so convincing that there’s a decent chance it has managed to trick some of the more security-savvy users who encountered it.
Combining the ad on Google with a website with an almost identical URL creates a near perfect storm of deception.
“Users are first deceived via the Google ad that looks entirely legitimate and then again via a lookalike domain,” Jérôme Segura, head of threat intelligence at security provider Malwarebytes, wrote in a post Wednesday that revealed the scam.
The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google.
When in doubt, people can open a new browser tab and manually type the URL, but that’s not always feasible when they’re long.
Another option is to inspect the TLS certificate to make sure it belongs to the site displayed in the address bar.
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The bot skips an important point. The site looks really close to the genuine site, only difference being “ķeepass dot info” and not “keepass”. Definitely easy to miss.
I feel like browsers should flag urls with unicode in their domains as suspicious by default. Maybe they already do, not sure. It’s honestly surprising to me in 2023 if they don’t.
I wouldn’t mind if FF popped up and said “hey, take another look at that URL” and very clearly drew attention to the weird k character. Of course it would have a “I’m absolutely sure this isn’t a scam, I own this domain or know who owns it and you don’t need to warn me about it in the future” button, but better safe than sorry.
FF Android redirects me to the real keepass page and I have no idea why :D
Lol are you sure?
This should be ON by default, in my opinion. Also, I believe Mozilla has a massive opportunity here to demarcate themselves as the more security-conscious browser vendor. “This phishing trick works on all major browsers except Firefox” would be great publicity material.
“Paid for by an outfit” what does that mean?
“… please deactivate your adblocker …” they said.
Wow. Valid cert, matching icon, identical web page, and virtually-identical URL. I absolutely would have fallen for that, and I’ve been meaning to visit KeePass’s website and download the latest version, too.
Except when it’s an Extended Validation certificate, which requires the requester to go through a manual vetting process.
But apparently for some reason, Firefox doesn’t show the EV label in the URL bar anymore.
That’s because EV certs were not only a pretty awful idea in hindsight (A, B), but also because humans aren’t really good at checking the security and trustworthiness of a website (C) in general, which is why browsers have collectively started to stop signalling HTTPS as something to be trusted all together.
