Google Provides Malware Info to Webmasters to Improve Security
It's Cyber Security Awareness Month, and the folks at Google are taking it seriously. To do this, Google has enhanced Webmaster Tools to offer Webmasters samples of the malicious code the company's scanners have uncovered. The samples - which Google says typically take the form of injected HTML tags, JavaScript or embedded Adobe Flash Player files - are available in the "Malware details" Labs feature. "Registered Webmasters (registration is free) of infected sites do not need to specially enable the feature -- they will find links to it on the Webmaster Tools dashboard," blogged Lucas Ballard, on behalf of Google's Anti-Malware, Anti-Malvertising and Webmaster Tools teams. "Webmasters will see a list of their pages that we found to be involved in malware distribution and samples of the malicious content that Google's scanners encountered on each infected page." Here is an example of what the feature looks like and the type of information it will provide. Though this move by Google undoubtedly offers additional insight to Webmasters, Ballard cautioned against using the tool as the be-all-end-all to Website security. "Google's scanners may not be able to provide malware samples in all cases, and the malware samples may not be a complete list of all the malware on the page," he explained. "More importantly, we advise against simply removing the examples that are displayed in Webmaster Tools. If the underlying vulnerability is not identified and patched, it is likely that the site will be compromised again."
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Comments (1)
Like many people, I tend to really favor and trust Google. Normally i would be all over a security offering from them, but at this point I just don't feel good about it. They have been up to some practices lately that I just cannot support. I think I will stay with a company that has a proven track record of keeping malware off my system. I will look in on Google when they are better established in this sector.
Posted by Criss | January 19, 2010 9:40 AM