<story><title>Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup</title><url>https://gomox.medium.com/google-safe-browsing-can-kill-your-startup-7d73c474b98d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vaduz</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a relatively long article - but it does not answer one simple question, which is quite important when discussing this: &lt;i&gt;were there any malicious files hosted on that semi-random Cloudfront URL&lt;/i&gt;? I realise that Google did not provide help identifying it - but that does not mean one should simply recomission the server under a new domain and continue as if nothing has happened!&lt;p&gt;From TFA:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We quickly realized an Amazon Cloudfront CDN URL that we used to serve static assets (CSS, Javascript and other media) had been flagged and this was causing our entire application to fail for the customer instances that were using that particular CDN&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Around an hour later, and before we had finished moving customers out of that CDN, our site was cleared from the GSB database. I received an automated email confirming that the review had been successful around 2 hours after that fact. No clarification was given about what caused the problem in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Yes, yes, Google Safe Browsing can use its power to wipe you off the internet, and when it encounters a positive hit (false or true!) it does so quite broadly, but that is also &lt;i&gt;exactly what is expected for a solution like that to work&lt;/i&gt; - and it will do it again if the same files are hosted under a new URL as soon as detects the problem again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gomox</author><text>Author here. Nothing was fixed, and the blacklist entry was cleared upon requesting a review, with no explanation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup</title><url>https://gomox.medium.com/google-safe-browsing-can-kill-your-startup-7d73c474b98d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vaduz</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a relatively long article - but it does not answer one simple question, which is quite important when discussing this: &lt;i&gt;were there any malicious files hosted on that semi-random Cloudfront URL&lt;/i&gt;? I realise that Google did not provide help identifying it - but that does not mean one should simply recomission the server under a new domain and continue as if nothing has happened!&lt;p&gt;From TFA:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We quickly realized an Amazon Cloudfront CDN URL that we used to serve static assets (CSS, Javascript and other media) had been flagged and this was causing our entire application to fail for the customer instances that were using that particular CDN&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Around an hour later, and before we had finished moving customers out of that CDN, our site was cleared from the GSB database. I received an automated email confirming that the review had been successful around 2 hours after that fact. No clarification was given about what caused the problem in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Yes, yes, Google Safe Browsing can use its power to wipe you off the internet, and when it encounters a positive hit (false or true!) it does so quite broadly, but that is also &lt;i&gt;exactly what is expected for a solution like that to work&lt;/i&gt; - and it will do it again if the same files are hosted under a new URL as soon as detects the problem again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vbernat</author><text>They seem to be unable to answer this question since Google provided no URL. Without knowing what is considered malicious, how could they check if there was anything? What if it is a false positive?</text></comment>