by IKnowThings | 2025-10-10 17:43:05+00:00
I have recently had the pleasure of speaking with Google senior leadership involved in the Safe Browsing product on the topic of getting my SaaS product placed on their, "naughty list." The platform was down for 6 or so hours due to a false positive hit for phishing.

I have read A LOT of blogs/rants/incidents on social media about startups, small businesses, and individuals getting screwed by large companies in similar capacities. I am VERY sympathetic to those cries into the sky, shaking fists at clouds, knowing very well we are all very small and how the large providers seem to not care. With that in mind, I am not blind to the privilege my organization has to rope in Google to discuss root causes for incidents.

I am writing about it here because I believe most people will never be able to pull a key Google stakeholder into a 40 minute video call to deeply discuss the RCAs. The details of the discussion are probably protected by NDA so I'll be speaking in general terms.

Google has a product called Web Risk (https://cloud.google.com/web-risk/docs/overview), I hear it's mostly used by Google Enterprise customers in regulated verticals and some large social media orgs. Web Risk protects the employees of these enterprise organizations by analyzing URLs for indicators of risk, such as phishing, brand impersonation, etc.

My SaaS platform is well established and caters mostly to large enterprise. I provide enterprise customers with optional branded SSO landing pages. Customers can either use sign-in from the branded site (SP-initiated) or redirect from their own internal identity provider to sign-in (IdP-initiated). The SSO site branding is directed by the customer, think along the lines of what Microsoft does for Entra ID branded sign-in pages. Company logo(s), name, visual styling, and other verbiage may be included. The branded/vanity FQDN is (company).productname.mydomain.com.

You may be able to see where I'm headed at this point... Why was my domain blocked? For suspected phishing.

A mutual enterprise customer was subscribed to Google's Web Risk. When their employees navigated to their SSO site, Google scanned it. Numerous heuristics flagged the branded SSO site as phishing and we were blocked by Safe Browsing across all major web browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and probably others). Google told us that had our customer put the SSO site on their Web Risk allow-list, we wouldn't have been blocked.

I'm no spring chicken, I cannot rely nor expect a customer to do that, so I pressed for more which led to a lengthy conversation on risk and the seemingly, from my perspective, arbitrary decisions made by a black box without any sort of feedback loop.

I was provided a tiny bit of insight into the heuristic secret sauce, which led to prescribed guidance on what could be done to greatly reduce the risk of getting false positive flag for phishing again. Those specifics I assume I cannot detail here, however the overall gist of it is domain reputation. Google was unable to positively ascertain my domain's reputation.

My recommendation is for those of you out there in the inter-tubes who have experienced false positive Safe Browsing blocks, think about what you can do to increase your domain's public reputation. Also, get a GCP account so if you do get blocked, you can open a ticket from that portal. I was told it would be escalated to the appropriate team and be actioned on within 10-15 minutes.