Fighting Abuse on the ngrok Platform

At its core, ngrok allows millions of developers to easily and securely connect anything to the internet. Unfortunately, bad actors have used this capability to launch spamming, spoofing, and phishing attacks which we detect and stop using a multi-pronged approach combining automatic detection of suspicious activities, human moderation, and external reporting.

This week we enabled an interstitial page for all new, free users of the ngrok platform that are serving content through a browser. This is being done in an effort to eliminate bad actors using ngrok to host phishing attacks for unsuspecting users.

When a user accesses an ngrok HTTPS endpoint through a web browser they will be prompted to acknowledge that the site is being served by ngrok. The user should only need to do this once per browser, and then they can continue using ngrok as usual.

This should not impact users serving APIs or accessing ngrok endpoints programmatically.

Our goal is to be good internet citizens and do what we can to limit nefarious activity on our platform. You can learn more about our efforts - and instructions on how to submit anything suspicious - on our abuse page.

Happy ngrokking!