According to the Google Webmasters blog, Google has built scanners that detect malware on indexed websites to help protect users against malware threats. Warnings now show up to warn of pages identified as dangerous by these scanners, and the Google friendly browsers (Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) also use the data to alert users to suspicious sites.
Lucas Ballard says:
We’re happy to announce that we’ve launched a feature that enables Google to provide even more detailed help to webmasters. Webmaster Tools now provides webmasters with samples of the malicious code that Google’s automated scanners detected on their sites. These samples — which typically take the form of injected HTML tags, JavaScript, or embedded Flash files — are available under the “Malware details”on the Webmaster Tools dashboard. 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. In certain situations we can identify the underlying cause of the malicious code, and we’ll provide these details when possible. We hope that the additional information will assist webmasters and help prevent their visitors from being exposed to malware.
Ballard went on to caution webmasters to use the tool only as a starting point in their site clean-up process, saying that 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.
Tags: Google Webmasters Blog, Labs, malware
