Steemed Phish v0.0.23: revealing cloaked blacklisted URLs

View this post on Hive: Steemed Phish v0.0.23: revealing cloaked blacklisted URLs

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Bug Fixes

• in v0.0.17, fixed a bug where the plugin was conflicting with the login button on Steemit.com

New Features since v0.0.16

• some scammers are hiding their malicious links by cloaking them with URL shortening services. This makes it less easy to spot them. Steemed Phish now uses http://expandurl.com to expand URLs and run them through the blacklist check
• more sites have been added to the blacklist with the addition of blacklisted sites from #SteemCleaners
• Steemed Phish won't show the external warning bubble on friendly websites
• If Steemed Phish can't find a match neither in the whitelist or the blacklist, it will try to find a pattern in the URL that might indicate a suspicious link
• The blacklist and whitelist are now hosted outside of the extension so it is easier to update them without republishing the extension

Describe briefly and add screenshots/recordings if applicable.

• How did you implement it/them?
  Link to relevant lines in the code on GitHub and explain briefly what you added/changed.

Reminder of what Steemed Phish is

Steemed Phish is a Chrome extension that offers protection against Steemit.com phishing clones

Features

Changing icon color based on white/blacklist

This extension will validate Steemit related websites by changing its icon color:

• red is for blacklisted sites
• green is for recognised friendly sites
• grey is for unrecognised sites

Whitelist and blacklist

Steemed Phish does not rely solely on these list as anything not listed won't be protected. Blacklist and whitelist are hard to maintain but adding them helps widening the protection coverage.

When a site is neither whitelisted or blacklisted, Steemed Phish will try to check the URL structure to find known patterns and flag a link as supsicious by coloring it in pink.

There are currently 19 blacklisted websites and 31 whitelisted websites.

Phishing Alerts

If a user lands on a phishing website, Steemed Phish will display two types of alerts:

• a dialog that shows up even if the page was loaded in a tab in the background
• a full page alert, that covers the whole phishing page and offers a link to go back to Steemit.com. The full page alert also reminds the user of not using their Steemit Keys on unknown websites and keep their password (Owner Key) safe.

Expand shorten URL

Some links are shortened using services such as bit.ly, this prevents people from easily analysing the URL of the link. Steemed Phish uses a link expanding API to determine the destination URL of a link and then compare it again against the white/blacklist logic above.

Making external links more visible

Ideally, a user should be more careful on links they are clicking on by always paying attention to the URL of an anchor. But this is easier said than done and even the most experienced user can let down their guard sometimes and get tricked by the scammers.

Recently, Steemit.com, has added a feature that marks external links with a grey icon on the right of each links. Steemed Phish will make that icon more obvious by coloring it in purple. On top of that, it will make a bubble appear next to the mouse cursor with a text explaining the fact that clicking on the link with leads you away so don't use your password. This bubble won't show up on friendly (whitelisted) websites

Support lazy loading

The extension works even if the links are inserted into the page after page load (Ajax), for example:

1. The link was in a comment that was hidden due to low rating and I then revealed it.
2. The link is in a comment low in a popular page. The comment was not loaded at first but only when you scroll down

In both cases, the first time the page loads, the comment and the link is not loaded and displayed. Steemed Phish still works in these cases.

Roadmap and potential ideas

• make a bot that browses steemit for reports and extract URLs to be added to the blacklist
• make a bot that follows another bot (@guard) and listens for its downvotes and update the blacklist accordingly
• monitor the https://steem.chat/channel/steemitabuse channel for more URls to be added to the blacklist
• If Steem Guard project goes live, use its API to update the blacklist: https://steemit.com/steem/@hernandev/proposal-steemguard-phishing-and-scam-protection-tools(edited)

Download the extension

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/steemed-phish/eiaigalhddmmpdnehcigmlmgllomljgj

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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