Risks of a google sites subdomain hosted "unblocked games" site?

[john_wayne]

My child recently came home with a sites.google.com/.. URL for "unblocked games". 

What are the risks of allowing this?

Can't run a whois since the site is in effect a subfolder.

Did run the full URL through virustotal.com - to an "all clear" result.

None of the footer contact requirements are enforced.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Searches for "malicious unblocked games" and variations thereof yield no results.

Could be benign as someone making ad revenue by hosting scripted ports of games.. Or it could be a lot worse.

[minibois]

Since anything can be contained on these websites, it's really difficult to give you a valuable answer here.

Part of me feels like they might have just been playing an otherwise blocked game, with this indirect method.

 

Think about the different Flash game websites (or nowadays the different .io games) which might be blocked on school domains, by being hosted on a sites.google.com domain, the kids can still play otherwise blocked games.

 

Whether these 'unblocked games' carry something potentially dangerous is unknown of course.

[john_wayne]

13 minutes ago, minibois said:

Since anything can be contained on these websites, it's really difficult to give you a valuable answer here.

Part of me feels like they might have just been playing an otherwise blocked game, with this indirect method.

 

Think about the different Flash game websites (or nowadays the different .io games) which might be blocked on school domains, by being hosted on a sites.google.com domain, the kids can still play otherwise blocked games.

 

Whether these 'unblocked games' carry something potentially dangerous is unknown of course.

thanks for the insight. i've put the full url through several webpage scanners, and run a full scan with A/V locally. a browser config normally alerts me to child's pc activity, but the school's browser-level login had broken that. young kids being turned loose on the internet at school without guidance snuck its way in to usage at our home. up till last week the school district had all children on a shared password, despite my objections. they had to change that finally because an elementary student altered classmates' tests for the 2nd time this period.

[Mark Kaine]

15 hours ago, john_wayne said:

My child recently came home with a sites.google.com/.. URL for "unblocked games". 

What are the risks of allowing this?

Can't run a whois since the site is in effect a subfolder.

Did run the full URL through virustotal.com - to an "all clear" result.

None of the footer contact requirements are enforced.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Searches for "malicious unblocked games" and variations thereof yield no results.

Could be benign as someone making ad revenue by hosting scripted ports of games.. Or it could be a lot worse.

Allowing what?

 

What games get unblocked?

 

Is your son going to download "unblocked" games from there?

 

Which games? (for example)

 

 

You do understand that everything you wrote sounds like this is a piracy site yes?

 

 

Again, what "unblocked" games, what gets unblocked exactly?

[john_wayne]

7 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Allowing what?

 

What games get unblocked?

 

Is your son going to download "unblocked" games from there?

 

Which games? (for example)

 

 

You do understand that everything you wrote sounds like this is a piracy site yes?

 

 

Again, what "unblocked" games, what gets unblocked exactly?

@Mark Kaine

-Allowing the site to be visited / made use of.

-A bunch of generic games I have never heard of.
-No games get downloaded, they play in-browser.

-the games are named: slope, 1v1.lol, basketball.io, run 3, no AAA titles here..

-That's part of the reason I asked about this here, there is no discussion I could find online about the legitimacy and safety of the multitude of these subfoldered sites. The intent seems to be to a "resource" for children to play ported flash-style games in-browser with not being blocked by the school's firewall - because of the domain used being a subdomain of google. My mind (because I had the additional context of what was on the screen) instead went directly to trojan-horse-esque weaponization of pages being used to infiltrate [and thereafter exfiltrate] school networks, which are in-turn connected to government networks. One such scenario could play out as a specifically crafted cookie hijacking a school computer's browser (internet explorer) because the budget gets spent on network level security, yet the computers themselves go un-updated - which is the case especially in smaller school districts.

 

I am expecting someone in-the-know to either say "calm down boomer" or say "this is a risk that has been under the radar for too long". Reddit has mentions of these types of subfoldered unblocked pages of games for years, but only in the context of: "Here's a new URL to play games at". In moving to a zero-trust online culture, it strikes me as odd that there has been no conversation in either direction about these sites.

[Mark Kaine]

@john_wayne  I see, thanks for the clarification... I just wanted some more info as I also find it pretty strange, and probably wouldn't trust this site personally. Although it might be harmless, who knows - though it certainly seems rather sketchy to me...

 

Maybe you could also post in the network section, I mean this sub forum isn't completely the wrong one, but it's not frequented as much, plus I think it's rather a website / internet issue than "pc games"... Just a thought but yes I'd be definitely wary too before knowing my more about how this website / domain operates.