Re:Google AdWords Exploit Seen in the Wild
by tialaramex on Thursday May 09, 2019 @03:30AM
(#19866115)
I gave the best example around today already: WebAuthn. Its ancestor U2F has the same behaviour.
The credentials in these protocols depend explicitly on the verified FQDN of the server (and thus you can only use this with HTTPS). When scammer.example asks for your credentials there literally isn't a way to give it credentials for realbank.example. No matter how sure you are that you're a very smart person and definitely need to give scammer.example access to empty your bank accounts, no way to do this is available. Maybe next week you'll still be angry you couldn't do this, maybe you'll realise it was a scam, don't care.
This is why Google reports zero successful phishing for their own systems. U2F is mandatory there. Their employees aren't magical, some will fall for scammer.example and they will be really frustrated that they can't use their Google login like it says, and some will scream at their help desk team about how stupid this is, how it's totally broken, and even after they demand that the help desk person be fired and they change their password six times and write a ten page rant on their blog they still can't give their employee credentials to the scammer and Google remains safe.
The credentials in these protocols depend explicitly on the verified FQDN of the server (and thus you can only use this with HTTPS). When scammer.example asks for your credentials there literally isn't a way to give it credentials for realbank.example. No matter how sure you are that you're a very smart person and definitely need to give scammer.example access to empty your bank accounts, no way to do this is available. Maybe next week you'll still be angry you couldn't do this, maybe you'll realise it was a scam, don't care.
This is why Google reports zero successful phishing for their own systems. U2F is mandatory there. Their employees aren't magical, some will fall for scammer.example and they will be really frustrated that they can't use their Google login like it says, and some will scream at their help desk team about how stupid this is, how it's totally broken, and even after they demand that the help desk person be fired and they change their password six times and write a ten page rant on their blog they still can't give their employee credentials to the scammer and Google remains safe.