Saturday, June 14, 2014

4shared.com does not enforce HTTPs for login: Security Issue!

Perhaps you, too, received and email from 4Shared in the last few days. Some time ago I created an accoun there for downloading a driver, if I remember correctly. The title of their email sounded promising saying "Your data is safe and secured - Heartbleed update".

The problem is: Your data is NOT safe and secured with them at the moment.

As of writing 15 June 2014, Firefox is clearly showing that the login page at 4shared.com is not enforcing HTTPs:


The tragedy is that by the looks of it all pages of the site can be accesses without HTTPs enforced. This means that all traffic from and to the site can be easily read by anyone with a tool that can read network traffic and with access to the same network to which the user is connected, e.g. a public wifi hotspot.

While it is good news that they try to proactively address security relevant topics, it is shocking to see that they suggest to their users a non-encrypted connection to log in and to change their password.

Here is a workaround if you depend on this site: specifically enter the URL with "https://www.4shared.com" instead of "http://www.4shared.com". Note that the URL start with https (including the 's'!) instead of just 'http'.

Let's hope they fix this soon. Technically, that shouldn't be a major issue.