Beware!! Google Map Vulnerability Allows an Attacker to Redirect Victims into Malicious Websites

An open redirection vulnerability in Google Map lets allows hackers redirect victims into malicious websites that leads to downloaded malware and other potential threats.

Attackers Abuse Google’s goo.gl URL shortening service and hide the pernicious URL within it to trick victims and redirect to visit malicious web pages.

Since URL shortens work by sending the user browsers via at least one HTTP redirect that obviously helps an attacker to hide the scamming and phishing URL but Google intelligence always check the spammy URL almost as easy to report as they are to create.

In this case, Hackers are performing another HTTP redirection after the goo.gl redirection but this time attackers redirect into the legitimate website but its actually compromised by them.

According to Researcher, With a little help from,curl -I I followed the chain of URL redirects to see where I’d end up.

“There were two redirections in the chain before the final you-wouldn’t-click-it-if-you-saw-it Russian URL hosting an English language scam. The scam was the usual breathless guff and faux endorsements – in this case lies about the folks on Shark Tank – trying very, very hard to convince me that a turmeric diet pill can overcome my daily efforts to eat all the biscuits.”

Middle of the Redirect Chain Google Map Vulnerability

Interesting Part in this case, Middle of the redirect chain in between Shorten URL service and end of the Scam page.

Between the legitimate Google URL shortened you’d probably trust, and the Russian URL you probably wouldn’t, the redirection chain bounces you through another Google URL belonging to Google Maps.

An open Redirection vulnerability in Google Map service maps.app.goo.gl. allow lets attacker used it along with a service designed for shortening and malicious links were shared through Google Maps.

“Open redirect vulnerabilities allow attackers to abuse code that’s intended to perform an HTTP redirect to a specific something into code that redirects to anything.”

Ex: https://maps.app.goo.gl/?link=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.org

According to Naked Security Researcher, to avoid being abused, code that performs redirections should only send users to URLs that match a specific pattern or list of links thought to be OK.

In the case of Google maps that should be simple – if the URL in the link parameter isn’t a Google Map, there’s no reason to allow the redirection.