Hackers Tricks You With Advanced Phishing Attack using Fake Address Bar on Chrome for Android

A new form of a sophisticated phishing attack on Android Chrome let hackers hide the original address bar’ screen space by displaying its own fake URL bar when the user scrolls down the web page.

Security researcher James fisher demonstrated this phishing attack by hosting his own domain (jameshfisher.com), and he exploits the flaw in chrome browser for mobile.

The fake address bar that associated with the phishing web page posed with legitimate site URL by intercept the original chrome bar.

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Normally, when we scroll down the web page, browser hides the URL bar and the webpage will overlap on it because the page accessed via “trustworthy browser UI”.

Here, the phishing site abusing this process by displaying its own fake URL bar that posed as a legitimate bar and trick users to give away their personal information.

This attack is even worse, generally when users scroll up the webpage they will again reach the original URL bar, but in this case, attackers can trick users to never reappear the original URL bar.

Researcher call it as “scroll jail”, a trick let move entire page content into it, when users scroll up the page using a new element overflow:scroll.

According to James Fisher, the user thinks they’re scrolling up in the page, but in fact they’re only scrolling up in the scroll jail! Like a dream in Inception, the user believes they’re in their own browser, but they’re actually in a browser within their browser.

Behalf of demonstration, Fisher using HSBC domain (www.hsbc.com) as a fake URL bar and, by using the same way attackers could use any legit website to intercept the URL bar and trick to steal the data.

“Is this a serious security flaw? Well, even I, as the creator of the inception bar, found myself accidentally using it! So I can imagine this technique fooling users who are less aware of it, and who are less technically literate. The only time the user has the opportunity to verify the true URL is on page load, before scrolling the page. After that, there’s not much escape.” Fisher said. He also believes that it might be a security flaw in Chrome browser.

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