If you visit a website and see that its URL does not seem all that legitimate then chances are that you would want to avoid going to that website entirely. Shady URLs are generally a sign that the website that you are visiting might infect you with malware or try to harm you in some other way, shape or form, but address bar spoofing is the sort of thing that can make it difficult for you to ascertain whether or not a site is legitimate based on the URL due to the reason that the malicious actor in question will have used a vulnerability in the browser that you are using and make it so that the URL you can see would not be real and would instead be falsely using the name of a legitimate company such as Apple and the like.
This is particularly a problem when it comes to mobile browsers because of the fact that they don’t have a lot of screen space. Popular mobile browsers such as Safari and Opera are particularly prone to this sort of thing due to vulnerabilities that exist within their code, vulnerabilities that they would be rather easy for a malicious actor to end up using.
Notably, Google Chrome was not included in this list which means that Google might be doing something right in this regard. User safety should be the most important thing for major tech companies since not having the trust of your users might not allow these companies to succeed past a certain point. Suffice it to say that these vulnerabilities should end up getting patched as soon as possible, since address bar spoofing is the sort of thing that can be difficult to protect users from when it happens and most users are not equipped with the knowledge to pinpoint suspicious web pages without an accurate URL.
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This is particularly a problem when it comes to mobile browsers because of the fact that they don’t have a lot of screen space. Popular mobile browsers such as Safari and Opera are particularly prone to this sort of thing due to vulnerabilities that exist within their code, vulnerabilities that they would be rather easy for a malicious actor to end up using.
Notably, Google Chrome was not included in this list which means that Google might be doing something right in this regard. User safety should be the most important thing for major tech companies since not having the trust of your users might not allow these companies to succeed past a certain point. Suffice it to say that these vulnerabilities should end up getting patched as soon as possible, since address bar spoofing is the sort of thing that can be difficult to protect users from when it happens and most users are not equipped with the knowledge to pinpoint suspicious web pages without an accurate URL.
H/T: Rapid7 / RafayBaloch.
