Google Releases ‘Safe Browsing Diagnostic’! Itself Suffers With Malware Problem
Recently, Google had announced the launch of ‘Safe Browsing Diagnostic’, an online diagnostic page that, would provide detailed information about Google’s automatic detection and investigations. This service is now operational and is providing users with near accurate data findings.
If you need to know the status of any website, that you wish to test, then all you have to do is to prefix “google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=" before the domain name. You can even visit http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-05-23-n62.html to use the simplified version of this malware detection tool. You will be presented with an overview page that would make you aware of potential threats such as trojans or exploits that might be embedded in the website. There are also instances, when website might turn up entirely clean.
The service is entirely non-biased and provides you with easy-to-understand results, based on which you can assess the nature of the website, that you have performed the check for. The report that you see will have the following factors:
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The current listing of the website.
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Google’s result after the malware detections procedure was completed on the website.
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Website’s contribution if any, towards the distribution of Malware.
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Whether or not the website had hosted malware in the last 90 days.
Before reporting the service to our readers, I decided to take a go at it and put in google.com, in an effort to check the authenticity of the website. The report stated that even Google was facing considerable amount of threats from malware, this is what I got:
“Of the 386374 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 4 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/25/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 03/13/2008.
Malicious software includes 4 scripting exploit(s), 4 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 10 new processes on the target machine.
Malicious software is hosted on 4 domain(s), including 58.65.239.0, truemaybe.com, abc-powers.com.
5 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including xtraff.biz, x-traffic.ws, smartvideochannel.com.”
Still the results displayed for google.com aren’t that alarming, for the sole reason that google.com has more than 12 million pages indexed in Google. Hence, prevention of all malware on so many pages is nearly impossible. Google’s own creation, Blogspot.com has also been found heavily infected with malware.
This is the result for Blogspot.com:
“Of the 1175590 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 8584 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/25/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 05/25/2008.
Malicious software includes 5885 trojan(s), 844 scripting exploit(s), 262 adware(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 4 new processes on the target machine.
Malicious software is hosted on 258 domain(s), including findsprint.info, 78.129.166.0, netsearch.cc.
209 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including findsprint.info, pay-ads.com, earthfive.com.”
May 28th, 2008 at 1:33 am
[...] Google has released a malware detection service known as the 'Safe Browsing Diagnostic'. This service will help users and Webmasters in detecting a malware on the visiting websites or the ones they own. It would provide detailed information about Google's automatic detection and investigations. More… [...]