Google Keeps Tabs on Dangerous Sites

Move over Symantec... Time to pack it in McAfee...

Friday, May 11, 2007 by Zoomba | Discussion: WinCustomize News

According to research done by Google, 1 in 10 web pages contain malicious code that could be used to infect a user's PC.  This based on a survey 4.5 million sites out of the billions crawled regularly by Google's web search spider.  In that number, around 450,000 were capable of "drive-by-downloads", sites that install malicious code without the user knowing.  Another 700,000 pages were considered capable of compromising a PC via other methods.

The research being done by Google stands a chance of not only indexing dangerous sites, but begin to paint a picture of how hackers are trying to compromise systems, what trends are emerging, and hopefully find ways to proactively block and counteract such attacks.

Could Google be the Anti-Virus company of the Internet?

5 Reply 7 Referrals
ShelbyGT_The_Car
Reply #1 Saturday, May 12, 2007 12:14 AM
Good luck google - they should look in the mirror more often!

SGT  

starkers
Reply #2 Saturday, May 12, 2007 4:25 AM
It's one thing to list dangerous sites....another to provide links to same in search results. Google, if you're sincere about combating/eliminating these threats, simply refuse point blank to refer users to them. Behave responsibly rather than a corporate money making machine, regardless of the expense/consequences to others.

Jafo
Reply #3 Saturday, May 12, 2007 7:41 AM

So....what happens when they 'flag' a site incorrectly?

More money for lawyers, that's what....


bobbyhundreds
Reply #4 Saturday, May 12, 2007 9:20 AM
It's one thing to list dangerous sites....another to provide links to same in search results. Google, if you're sincere about combating/eliminating these threats, simply refuse point blank to refer users to them. Behave responsibly rather than a corporate money making machine, regardless of the expense/consequences to others.


Absolutely! spot on.  

Kamafucktra
Reply #5 Sunday, May 13, 2007 5:18 PM
So....what happens when they 'flag' a site incorrectly?
More money for lawyers, that's what....

False positives are an inevitability, but I doubt it would be much worse than when an anti-virus application does the same thing, both in frequency of occurrences and the owner's response. Hopefully it wouldn't be too difficult to become unflagged. I suppose those that are confirmed should have a different flag than those discovered by some heuristics.

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