A few days ago, I was using Gmail on my PC. And suddenly I was unable to open email from the Gmail main titles page. A few moments ago, I was able to. I jumped to another tab and internet was working fine and I was able to interact with other tabs, just not Gmail. So I gave up after 10-15 mins. Could an attacker selectively stop me from interacting with just 1 site?
Whoa, slow down there @lunarlander, let's start form the beginning In the title you already decided that it was an (capital a) attack, but then you question whether this is possible. You also did not state which browser you use or how many tabs you had open and what was in them. How many extensions and which ones. But most of all, why would you immediately assume an attack? As opposed to a glitch in software/hardware. ... This related to that?
Yes, the Attack was an assumption I realize that. However, gmail was working moments ago. And I am ruling out a gmail server outage because they have so many servers and google must have fail over configurations. I am using Firefox 69.0.3 and disabled all default extensions and did not install any extensions. I was using at most 3 tabs, don't remember exactly now, but one would be about:config, one gmail, and at most one other. I was checking email to see which ones I have to reply to and send over google drive links to files. So I still am wondering if it could be an attack. And if there are any possible ways an attack could do this. If there is no possible way that an attacker could carry this out without affecting other tabs, then I will rule out it is an attack. What I am asking for is if anyone has experienced this - gmail not responding to clicks while other tabs are working, for a good 15 mins. And it would be bonus if they also knew there is such an attack. Then I would see if it can be mitigated. Yes, the machine is the hardened one. But the hardening has no bearing/effect on web browsing. I fully understand each hardening step - I wrote it. The only things that I re-enabled in order talk to gmail is javascript and dom.storage in firefox. And those are the only 2 things that needs enabling and it was working previously.
Are you using this to keep the Gmail tab open: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pinned-tabs-keep-favorite-websites-open
