Ensure 'Warn when visiting a fraudulent website' is 'Enabled'

MediumLevel 1Automatedsafari

Description

Safari can be configured to alert the user that the site they are visiting is known to be malicious. It is recommended that this capability be enabled. Rationale: Users will be alerted about known malicious web sites, thus decreasing the probability of a user’s browser or system being exploited by known malware or phishing site. Audit reads WarnAboutFraudulentWebsites from the com.apple.Safari preference domain of the account running the scan (the PDF checks the same token in com.apple.Safari.plist; manual check: Follow the below steps and verify that Warn when visiting a fraudulent website is Enabled: 1. Click Safari. 2. Click Preferences. 3. Click Security. 4. Verify Warn when visiting a fraudulent website i). Safari is sandboxed, so the reading process needs Full Disk Access on macOS 10.14+. A missing key exits non-zero and is reported as FAIL even where the built-in default is compliant. Values forced by a configuration profile live in /Library/Managed Preferences and are not read here.

How it is checked

Audit method: Shell command

shell

out=$(defaults read com.apple.Safari WarnAboutFraudulentWebsites 2>/dev/null) || exit 1; printf '%s\n' "$out"

Expected output: 1

How it is fixed

Fix method: Guidance or infrastructure patch

Follow the below steps to set Warn when visiting a fraudulent website to Enabled: 1. Click Safari. 2. Click Preferences. 3. Click AutoFill. 4. Check the Warn when visiting a fraudulent website checkbox. Or deploy a configuration profile for com.apple.Safari setting WarnAboutFraudulentWebsites = true, or as the logged-in user run: defaults write com.apple.Safari WarnAboutFraudulentWebsites -bool true and restart Safari.

Properties

Operating systems: Any
Tags: safaribrowsercis-l1
Reference: CIS macOS Safari Benchmark v2.0.0 - 6.1 Ensure 'Warn when visiting a fraudulent website' is 'Enabled'

Check this host

Run this on a machine you are allowed to audit. The scan is read-only.

shell

tmaegis scan --target safari