Firefox is blocking my personal website based on flawed "Google Safe Browsing" What the hell?
Started this morning. All of my personal tools like nextcloud and RSS reader were blocked, and I had to go manually override that screen for each one. Unacceptable.
Looks like Google is the responsible one, not Firefox. Don't shoot the messenger.
Why is firefox trusting the evil empire to tell it what sites are safe?
Don't have the funding to themselves, and probably worth it so new users don't get fucked
Why does Firefox need to tell Google which sites you're visiting even if you don't use Google Search ?
All checking is done locally on your machine from a hashed list of "bad" domains, your visits aren't sent to google. You can get the full details here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-malware-protection-work
This is a protection mechanism to prevent laymen from falling for scam websites. It is a service offered by Google, enabled by default in Firefox. It can disabled in the configs.
Set up google search console for that domain, then it will tell you why it’s blocked. It might be a false positive you can flag, or it might be that a host or service has been compromised or contains something harmful. Google’s blocklist is quite aggressive and often blocks entire domains if one of their subdomains has a violation.
Yeah, people are getting really upset at Google/Mozilla here but SafeBrowsing is actually a very good service. I legitimately believe that it frequently prevents malware infections and phishing on a regular basis. It is also architected with a privacy-first approach that reveals very little data to Google. And the SafeBrowsing privacy policy is actually one of Google's very tight ones.
I think Mozilla made the right choice to enable it by default. They also make it fairly easy to disable this for advanced users under the "Deceptive Content and Dangerous Software Protection" setting. (No need to crack open about:config, disabling it is fully supported.)
I understand that this may be a controversial opinion.
Thank you for the advice!
You can just disable Google Safe Browsing in the settings.
But the problem is the general public. People who have it enabled won't be able to visit his website.
It doesn't seem to be a public website
All of my personal tools like nextcloud and RSS reader were blocked
google owns the internet
Are you using a free subdomain?
I am and have this issue sometimes. What’s the connection / cause?
Just get a cheap domain. Free domain will always get flagged, unless it's for a service with no development API. It's too easy as an attack vector, so those free domains often get flagged. If you want to avoid it all together, just get a cheap domain you own and control.
I'm not, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if this happened and I was though. Thanks for the context.
I got hit by that, basically forced me to make a Google account and add all my sites to it even though I couldn't care less about SEO and indexing. Now it keeps sending me spam emails about "problems" with my websites. No, I'm intentionally not letting you index this.
What seems to be going on is it's flagging random widespread open-source software as impersonation/phishing login page because it's seen it on a bigger site and assumes you're doing some phishing.
Filed an appeal and it thankfully promptly got resolved. Google ain't known to be friendly to developers.
I want to like that feature because I'm sure it's helpful for the less technically savvy. But I hate that Google can just decide my site is unsafe and essentially cut my sites off the Internet for most people. If Google denies your appeal you have basically zero recourse.
That sucks, yeah. Thanks for sharing, its good to know that its not just me.
I think we need more info here. I'm guessing this is a locally hosted site? How are you exposing it to the web? DDNS? Reverse proxy? Honestly it's hard to diagnose without knowing your IP, which you definitely shouldn't give us.
Edit: you can check your site here, maybe they'll give you details on why it was blacklisted: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search
Thank you for the link, but it just returns "no data" on my site.
Locally hosted on a not-static IP with cloudflare DNS and their proxy stuff.
Just reporting back that the transparencyreport page just says "some pages on this site are unsafe" without elaboration. It then offers that if I want details I have to give it individual page links at a time to see if they're the cause of the alert... Ugh.
Happend to me recently, with no option to "ignore and continue". I opened the page in private mode and it worked. Weird.
If you have a dynamic IP from your ISP, could be you got unlucky and were given a address previously used by attackers.
Or if you have a static IP on a VPS or similar, they may have had a lot of attacks from the IP Range.
By attacks in this instance I mean people setting up phishing or similar websites as the most common example. A simple web form, probably with obfuscated code. They then send a bunch of emails line "click here to view your invoice"and gather office 365 credentials.
While it's not good that this kind of false positive happens from time to time, I am more thankful this kind of service exists. Yes, there's privacy and security implications, but smart screen has stopped legitimate attacks at our clients before, and we force it enabled wherever possible.
Thank you for the context, that makes sense and it would be difficult to prevent a recycled IP from causing this kind of problem.
it lieratly gives you a link to report a detection problem
Click “ignore the risk” and it will continue to the page. You better be certain you aren’t being man in the middle attacked though.
I think people are missing the point here if they say "just click through". Mozilla's reliance on Google could potentially be anticompetitive in nature if Google is essentially worsening a self hosted service which would compete with their own offerings.
Except this is more a symptom of relying on someone else’s hardware, network connectivity, and/or domain. Google isn’t blacklisting Nextcloud.
That's weird. Google is using Safe Browsing to censor the Internet.
You can go to about:config and set browser.safebrowsing.blockedURIs.enabled to false.
It will be better if Mozilla make their own version of Google Safe Browsing. Because less Google is good.
Thank you for the tip!