Does Freedome protect me from this sort of hacked website?

AlanSteinberger

Hi all. I'm about one week into my trial of Freedome (on OS X and iOS), and am impressed.

 

Hopefully this will have been fixed by the time anyone reads this post, but last night, when navigating to pasadenasymphony-pops.org (note no www prefix), I realized that Safari on my iPhone was instead redirecting me to a bogus site. Typing in the full www.pasadenasymphony-pops.org, however,  worked fine. The Google Transparency Report said "Some pages on pasadenasymphony-pops.org contain deceptive content right now."

 

Two questions:

 

1. Should I have expected Freedome to identify the bogus site as suspicious or harmful, and prevent it from loading?

2. If no, had I then clicked on one of those links on the hijacked page, would Freedome have intercepted that click?

 

And for extra credit:

 

3. Hasn't it been years since it was necessary to type in http://www. at the front of a URL? What's different about this site that the presence or absence of the prefix would send the URL in two different directions?

 

Thanks!

AlanSteinberger

I'll take the silence as a "no".

 

I would be more inclined to sign up for a Freedome subscription if a representative of F-Secure would respond to my questions.

[Deleted User]

Hello AlanSteinberger,

 

Sorry for not getting back to you earlier.

Freedome Browsing protection blocks web sites that may contain harmful content or steal your personal information, including credit card numbers, user account information, and passwords.

 

Could you tell us which bogus page you were redirected to? Also from where did younavigate to the first pasadenasymphony-pops.org that was potentially dangerous?

 

I unfortunately couldn't find the Google transparency report you mentioned.

In case of doubt, you can always submit the URL to our lab.

AlanSteinberger

Thanks for your reply, Ben.

The Google transparency report is here:

https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/safebrowsing/diagnostic/index.html#url=pasadenasymphony-pops.org

I navigated to the page from a new window in Safari on my iPhone. I believe we repeated this behavior with Chrome and one search engine. Other browsers and search engines that I tried automatically added the www prefix and were not redirected away from the legitimate site.

The pages to which I was redirected had a variety of names (which I did not write down, sorry), and all were purporting to sell prescription drugs.

My concern was not so much this specific hack, but more generally whether Freedome would protect one from clicking links before realizing that the page had been hijacked. Now that my trial has expired, I would appreciate someone trying that and seeing if/when Freedome blocks it as suspicious or harmful.

[Deleted User]

I submitted the URL to our lab and they checked it.

 pasadenasymphony-pops .org has been verified to be clean. The appropriate rating is already in place.

 

We unfortunately do not know on which criteria Google transparency report is done.