The API is still experimental, but we hope it will be useful to ISPs, web-hosting companies, and anyone building a site or an application that publishes or transmits user-generated links. Sign up for a key and let us know how we can make the API better. We fully expect to iterate on the design and improve the data behind the API, and we'll be paying close attention to your feedback as we do that. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
In addition to targeting malware, we're interested in combating phishing, a social engineering attack where criminals attempt to lure unsuspecting web surfers into logging into a fake website that looks like a real website, such as eBay, E-gold or an online bank. Following a successful attack, phishers can steal money out of the victims' accounts or take their identities. To protect our users against phishing, we publish a blacklist of known phishing sites. This blacklist is the basis for the anti-phishing features in the latest versions of Firefox and Google Desktop. Although blacklists are necessarily a step behind as phishers move their phishing pages around, blacklists have proved to be reasonably effective.
Not all phishing attacks target sites with obvious financial value. Beginning in mid-March, we detected a five-fold increase in overall phishing page views. It turned out that the phishing pages generating 95% of the new phishing traffic targeted MySpace, the popular social networking site. While a MySpace account does not have any intrinsic monetary value, phishers had come up with ways to monetize this attack. We observed hijacked accounts being used to spread bulletin board spam for some advertising revenue. According to this interview with a phisher, phishers also logged in to the email accounts of the profile owners to harvest financial account information. In any case, phishing MySpace became profitable enough (more than phishing more traditional targets) that many of the active phishers began targeting it.
Interestingly, the attack vector for this new attack appeared to be MySpace itself, rather than the usual email spam. To observe the phishers' actions, we fed them the login information for a dummy MySpace account. We saw that when phishers compromised a MySpace account, they added links to their phishing page on the stolen profile, which would in turn result in additional users getting compromised. Using a quirk of the CSS supported in MySpace profiles, the phishers injected these links invisibly as see-through images covering compromised profiles. Clicking anywhere on an infected profile, including on links that appeared normal, redirected the user to a phishing page. Here's a sample of some CSS code injected into the "About Me" section of an affected profile:
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