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Help HN: Google just blocked my site as deceptive site

40 pointsby uploaderwinabout 4 years ago
I run a website called Uploader window (www.uploader.win) that helps users to add an upload widget to their own apps or websites.<p>This morning I got a message from google that my site has been blocked for being Deceptive and it has listed my homepage as the deceptive URL. Anybody who will open the site gets a big red screen with a warning.<p>I&#x27;ve checked the source code by hand and everything I could check and I can&#x27;t find any reason for hack or any security issues.<p>The only possible reason I can think off is we have a demo on our homepage which allows users to upload test files to try out the uploader and we offer a 20MB test space to help users during development. All test files are deleted after 24 hours. I have also disabled both these features since. But Google didn&#x27;t say if this was the cause.<p>I&#x27;ve submitted a review to Google but not sure how long it will take.<p>We have a paying customers and all sites which have our script are now showing this warning too.<p>I am feeling super helpless and super scared how this is going to affect them.<p>Do you know of any way I can expidite the review? Any thing you can suggest to help me?

10 comments

uploaderwinabout 4 years ago
Hey guys! Great news.<p>Looks like Google just removed us from the blacklist. Maybe somebody from Google saw this or maybe I got reviewd quickly but I couldn&#x27;t be happier.<p>Here are a few things I did<p>- Removed all inline images (As mentioned in my other comments a lot of virus sites were tagging me base64 embedded due to inline images)<p>- Disabled test uploads for now. I will probably make the test file expire after 2 mins and never host them on the same domain<p>- Moving the external scripts to another domain. You never know what can get you blacklisted so best to keep customer facing part separate from main domain.<p>I cannot be more thankful to all the people who replied and offered suggestions. You guys rock!<p>P.S. In case you guys still seeing the red screen of death, please let me know.
romlandabout 4 years ago
You say &quot;All test files are deleted after 24 hours.&quot;, that implies to me that files people upload _could_ be downloaded too.<p>If that is the case, that is where you are vulnerable. Free hosting of a file at a trusted domain is worth something.<p>If people are not intended to be able to download their test files, check your logs, someone might have found a way around it.<p>That&#x27;s the best I can think of.
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ikirisabout 4 years ago
You allow anyone to upload random malware and you&#x27;ll host it for them for 24 hours?
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_-___________-_about 4 years ago
First and foremost, host the hosted script that you let users use on a different domain - especially if you&#x27;re letting random people upload random files to your primary domain!
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OJFordabout 4 years ago
I&#x27;d report it as incorrect, but I can&#x27;t even ignore the warning (Firefox, clicking proceed anyway just pops up an additional &#x27;deceptive site&#x27; banner that follows me even after navigation away &#x2F;shrug) - so I can&#x27;t really justifiabally report it sight unseen.<p>Where does the upload go when your customers use it on their site though? Maybe what&#x27;s deceptive is that if HN shows an upload area in an iframe or whatever, and I upload something, I expect that I&#x27;m giving it to HN, but really it&#x27;s gone straight to you at Uploader.win?<p>(Fwiw I also think uploader.win is not a great name, your search result looks like it&#x27;s a good tool, but the name sounds sort of scammy, like the kind of thing you&#x27;d get if you searched &#x27;free download exe&#x27; or something.)
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Matstaabout 4 years ago
I just had a look on Ahrefs and couldn&#x27;t notice anything weird.<p>One thing I did notice, is that you have your jpg&#x27;s inline. McAfee and other virus protection apps are completely trigger happy anytime you encode a substantial amount of &quot;code&quot; (yes it&#x27;s an image). I would try removing the inline images and linking them and see if that makes any difference.
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arkitaipabout 4 years ago
Is Search Console giving any useful info?<p>FYI your domain seems to be blacklisted by Firefox, McAfee, Sophos among others [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.virustotal.com&#x2F;gui&#x2F;url&#x2F;e75b77237f60332ef78b2399cfc49cbc9084d16498c93fef5a6ef9806b7f8159&#x2F;detection" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.virustotal.com&#x2F;gui&#x2F;url&#x2F;e75b77237f60332ef78b2399c...</a>
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reconquestioabout 4 years ago
I don&#x27;t really know any way around other than that we can report the incorrect phishing warning here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;safebrowsing.google.com&#x2F;safebrowsing&#x2F;report_error&#x2F;?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uploader.win%2F&amp;hl=en-US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;safebrowsing.google.com&#x2F;safebrowsing&#x2F;report_error&#x2F;?u...</a>
stityabout 4 years ago
You domain name confused me when I first saw it : uploader.win seems related to Windows at first sight. Whereas your product has nothing to do with Windows. Something like [catchy-unique-name]-uploader.[com&#x2F;io&#x2F;app] seems less misleading.
markdownabout 4 years ago
Obviously you&#x27;re a small business and this isn&#x27;t a feasible option, but I wonder if you had a case to sue Google for libel.<p>They&#x27;re telling people that your business is dangerous and could harm them.