Many businesses use our Enterprise File Sharing Product called FileCloud (http://www.tonido.com/filecloud). Think of it as a self-hosted alternative to Dropbox. With the latest Chrome update, the browser is showing phishing warning (http://patch.codelathe.com/foruser/phish_1.jpg) with our installations. The warning is not based on the domain and it appears in our different customer installations. It has to be heuristic based because it generates warning even on a debug/local webpage. The chrome browser heuristically decides our login page as a phishing page and gives the wrong warning. We are trying to find if there are any published "guidelines" as to legitimate web pages should NOT be doing to trigger these? Either there should be clear methods to resolve these warnings or Chrome should avoid doing this blanket-so-called-protection racket.
Because of Google’s missteps, our reputation as well as customer reputation got a hit. We have spent countless hours in our resources to see what is going on and all thing points to heuristic decision making by Chrome browser. There is no way to contact Google Chrome team to resolve this issue. We have lost few large deals. Now all our support team is pretty much focused on this issue and fielding queries from our customers.
Since our UI code (Developed in GWT) is common between our Enterprise and Consumer product (Tonido), if we this error start appearing in our consumer version (half a million users) it is an EXISTENTIAL RISK to our company that we have built over 5 years.
We have 2 questions.
1. How to get in touch with Chrome team and solve the issue?
2. Are there any legal avenues or precedence to force Google to take action and claim compensation for lost business?
Please provide us with your suggestions.
P.S: It is happening to our software today. It may happen to your products tomorrow.
Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
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Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#2Have you tried to produce a minimal version of the software to show the problem? If not do it now and post it on the Google Chrome Bug tracker: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list
Other contact forms: Mailing Lists: http://www.chromium.org/developers/discussion-groups IRC Channel: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/irc
Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#3Hmm that sucks. All I can suggest is you systematically remove content from the page until the error stops - this way perhaps you can identify the offending content (or combination of content which aggregates to an "offence")
Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#4You may also be interested in this article: https://medium.com/surveillance-state/32ba2b38c219
Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#5External dependencies on that page? Anything being pulled from a domain that might have made the list? It might not be specific to your page, it might be on a JS library you are including.
Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#6Report an incorrect phishing warning at http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/ .
If you received a phishing warning but believe that this is
actually a legitimate page, please complete the form below
to report the error to Google. Information about your
report will be maintained in accordance with Google's
privacy policy.
Use Google Webmaster Tools for your product site and check for issues: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
Try to come up with a reason why this may not be a false positive. Perhaps you have trademark issues? etc.
More info:
http://blog.chromium.org/2008/11/understanding-phishing-and-... This includes the URL of the website you are visiting, as well as the URL of any included resources (such as included JavaScript or Adobe Flash movies)
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/99020
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/hotbots07/tech/full_pape... [pdf] The Ghost In The Browser. Analysis of Web-based Malware (a paper to make this post interesting to others)
Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#7Have you tried to produce a minimal version of the software to show the problem? If not do it now and post it on the Google Chrome Bug tracker: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list Other contact forms: Mailing Lists: http://www.chromium.org/developers/discussion-groups IRC Channel: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/irc
That failing, get money for them blocking a competitor.
before downvoting, take the time to explain how this would be different from old good Google suing Microsoft just for not making their product use Google easier than it already allowed.
Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#8Hey there, I actually worked for a "competitor" of yours at one time in my career. We had a very similar problem, turned out that one of our users shared(probably unknowingly) a file containing malware and probably posted it to their twitter or facebook(we had that feature built-in at the time). This URL was caught by a very popular anti-virus company, which posted it on their site. I guess the software phones-home to get all copies out there in sync. So for awhile, anyone with this anti-virus software would get blocked on our site's homepage for malware and/or phishing attempt. My somewhat-educated guess would be that a costumer of yours has hosted something that Google(or whatever Google uses to get its info) considers shady. Our solution was first to contact the company to get delisted, then I think we ended up changing domains for the sharing stuff. Similar to dropbox's dl.dropbox.com for any sharing stuff. Or maybe we did some kind of URL-shortener. But somehow, a change to the URL's domain of anything that hosted user-generated content was the solution to the problem, AFAIK.
Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#9Hey there, I actually worked for a "competitor" of yours at one time in my career. We had a very similar problem, turned out that one of our users shared(probably unknowingly) a file containing malware and probably posted it to their twitter or facebook(we had that feature built-in at the time). This URL was caught by a very popular anti-virus company, which posted it on their site. I guess the software phones-home t…
Hi,
Our software is little different. It is a self-hosted software. It is hosted by our customers under different domain names in their infrastructure. So it is not the same domain or URL.
For Example:
Customer 1: fileshare.abcplumbing.com
Customer 2: dataanywhere.peterlawfirm.com
Thats the real problem here. It affects our customer installations under different domains. To some extent, we are fine if google is blocking one domain because somebody in the domain is sharing malware. The issue here is different.
Re: Ask HN: Google Chrome heuristic warnings pose threat to our business
#10Report an incorrect phishing warning at http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/ . If you received a phishing warning but believe that this is actually a legitimate page, please complete the form below to report the error to Google. Information about your report will be maintained in accordance with Google's privacy policy. Try posting a thread on the Google forums and decribe the false positive in neutral te…
Unfortunately we have done all that. It is not a domain issue or safe browsing issue. The best analogy here is let us say lot of customers run a default drupal or joomla site under their domain and Google chrome show these sites as phishing site.