If you have taken a look at my projects section recently, you’ll notice I have a new project and it’s not web-based. Wtf?! I know right.. I’m pushing the boat out.
As I have the URL shortener project – from time to time I’ll sometimes get spammed with a load of URLs being created that could be deemed as potentially harmful. 99% of the time, those links are in fact phishing links. While I have been manually doing research on the URLs and then adding them to my auto-removal script, I did some Google-fu and stumbled upon the Google Safe Browsing Database. It makes sense that Google would have their own database considering the fact that they flag malicious URLs directly in their browser when you try to visit them.
If you take a look at the Google Safe Browsing Transparency page, you can perform a single search for a domain and it will return a result of whether it is malicious or not. This was great, I could fire a URL through this page and check it. As time went on, the URL Shortener was gaining more and more created links and with it an increase in spam – so I had to look into something a bit better than manually checking URLs. With some more Google-fu, it turned out that in the Cloud Console, you could use the Google Safe Browsing API to not only lookup in bulk, but return the values in bulk. On top of this, the limit at which you could check was so high, that I could easily throw a thousand URLs at it within less than a minute and have the status returned.
This is where the program was born. I’m not great with naming things so I kept it conventional and it’s called “sbAPIScan”. I’ve worked on the basis that I’d like to provide it for general use to the public (assuming the user has their own API key) and therefore I’ve uploaded version 1.0.0 to GitHub as of yesterday.
I would love to hear any feedback from anyone that decides to use it. Especially if that means improving it or fixing bugs.