Forums getting flagged by chrome

chupamiubre

Hey in the pax post a picture thread its getting flagged by chrome for malware because of the following links.

Malware http://files.getdropbox.com/u/601333/Medic1.jpg

Malware http://files.getdropbox.com/u/601333/team1.jpg

Malware http://files.getdropbox.com/u/601333/lolblonde.jpg

its coming from this thread link here

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=96348


If i did this improperly sorry but just something i think should be looked into.

ASimPerson

It's a problem with getdropbox.com likely and not the forums.

tek

As a Dropbox user, here's some info from one of their founders/admins.

This issue was previously addressed, seemed it was one malicious user.

Arash F. wrote:

yikes, sorry again about this... I just switched back the domain sent to the clients to one that google sees as clean (dl.getdropbox.com). if you have links that are generating warnings, simply change 'files.getdropbox.com' to 'dl.getdropbox.com'

after the first incident, we came up with a way to prevent the single malicious user causing all these problems from republishing malicious content. we also registered with the google webmaster tools system in order to get notification of any malicious content detected. unfortunately, their site didn't let us know of any malicious content on the domain before banning us again as it should have . we've requested a review, but it does look like we're going to have to do one of two things to prevent another banning:

1) implement custom URLs for users i.e. dl.getdropbox.com/arash (apparently google will treat these as separate domains)
2) outright ban serving content as text/html (i.e. no hotlinking to html docs). this would unfortunately kill a pretty neat use case for dropbox, but solve all the malware issues.

I'll report back soon on what we decide to do, but appreciate any feedback.

Posted 4 hours ago #

Source: http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?page=2&id=10019&replies=66#post-72561

Option's their considering for handling it, since it's popped up again.

Arash F. wrote:

re. #1,
unfortunately, what google does is choose the most specific path or most specific subdomain that catches all the malware. this means that if we were to give out custom display names and do something like dl.getdropbox.com/arash, we actually could have the same problem. if {dl.getdropbox.com/badperson1 dl.getdropbox.com/badperson2.... dl.getdropbox.com/badperson1000} existed, that'd be enough for them to ban dl.getdropbox.com as a whole because there are too many unique bad sites.

here's what google has to say about it (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=656f2635c8527fd3&hl=en):

we try to keep malware labels as specific as possible based on our data. If we can see that it's limited to a specific subdomain, we'll do that. If we can recognize that it's limited to a specific subdirectory, even better. The general problem is that it's often not trivial to find the most specific part of a site that is affected by malware - and with CMSs as they are there's often no clear folder-type structure that we can work with.

the same problem would likely exist if we offered subdomains. if there are enough bad subdomains, (i.e. badperson1.getdropbox.com, badperson2.getdropbox.com... etc.), then the entire getdropbox.com domain would be banned.

in today's case, google decided to ban everything that starts with dl.getdropbox.com/u. it looks to me that while they could have banned dl.getdropbox.com/u/badpersonid, they decided that there were enough unique occurrences to conclude it'd be more effective to just ban everything with the /u prefix. that's bad news, because it means that any subdomain/custom display name solution would likely result in an identical ban.

in summary, I'm afraid #2 may be the only solution that can work in the long run .
Posted 3 hours ago #

Source: http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?page=2&id=10019&replies=66#post-72572


Edit: Seems you have to be a user to see their forums... Snip's posted.

tek

Latest Snip

Arash F. wrote:

hi all,
sorry if amidst all this discussion, the solution wasn't made obvious. simply adjust your links that say 'files.getdropbox.com' to 'dl.getdropbox.com' and the warnings will go away. the google warnings on 'files.getdropbox.com' should be removed in the next few hours.
Posted 3 hours ago #

Source: http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?page=3&id=10019&replies=73#post-72642