Google releases Suspicious Site Reporter extension for Chrome

[harlan4096]

Suspicious Site Reporter is a new browser extension by Google for the company's Chrome web browser that provides users with options to report sites to the company.

The extension has two main functions: to report sites to Google and to highlight if Google found anything suspicious about the site.

Suspicious Site Reporter adds an icon to the Chrome toolbar when you install it in the browser. The icon indicates when it detects something that it classifies as suspicious. A badge added to the icon indicates the number of issues detected on the page.

Not all of these issues are bad necessarily; imagine my surprise when Suspicious Site Reporter detected a issue on Ghacks. Turns out the site was flagged because it is not in the Top 5K of websites on the Internet.

The menu displays information that the extension collected about the site. The source code, which Google published on GitHub, highlights all alerts that the extension may display to its users:

* Domain uses uncommon characters (use of IDN).
* Not a top 5K site.
* Site was not visited in the past 3 months.

That's all that is checked by the application. The check for uncommon characters in domain names is arguably the most useful of the three as phishing sites may use IDN to look similar to the "real" site.

The panel highlights the data that will be submitted when users hit the "send report" button. Some data needs to be submitted, URL and IP address, while screenshots, DOM content, and the Referrer Chain are optional.

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