Google Malware Warning: Big Help or Big Brother? - A Little Investigating
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StopBadware then investigates the website and issues a report. Incidentally, StopBadware also receives reports from Google. If you wonder what StopBadware has to say about a website you want to go to, you can search its clearinghouse. Freecovers.net didn’t turn up in StopBadware’s clearinghouse, but here’s an example of a page that Google determined has malware and StopBadware put in its database:
Apologies for the size reduction and the cropping; you can see the full-size version here. This is a generic web page that StopBadware created for pages reported by Google. When they’ve followed up on an investigation, their report looks like this (again, cropped and shrunk to fit):
Again, if you want to see the full-size version, you can point your browser at this link.
StopBadware’s FAQ is interesting for anyone worried about what effect Google’s warnings will have on their web visitors. It emphasizes that Google’s investigation is independent from what StopBadware discovers. It also points out that nothing is stopping users from typing in or cutting and pasting the URL of a web site into their address bars, so Google isn’t actually blocking visitors. Additionally, “note that the URLs from the Google process that are sent to us by Google are posted on the StopBadware.org site without any review, research, or editing by us.”
You’re probably wondering if it’s possible for someone to falsely report your site to Google or StopBadware to have a warning placed in the search results for your site. StopBadware insists that it isn’t. “Google does not post warning pages merely in response to reports from the public but only after, and as a result of, its own testing of the site.” Additionally, “any sites that are reported to us by users are researched before any action is taken. We don not make public the sites that have been reported to us by users unless and until our research staff has checked for badware and verified the presence of badware or links to badware on the site.”
What should be scary for site owners is that their sites can often contain links to badware without their knowledge. This can happen if the site contains advertising provided by a third party, or if the site’s host server has been hacked. You can submit a request for review to StopBadware, and they seem willing to help show requesters what they need to do to clean up their sites and provide some education as to preventing the problem in the future.
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