Monday, February 26, 2007
In the fight against badware, protecting Google users by showing warnings before they visit dangerous sites is only a small piece of the puzzle. It's even more important to help site owners protect their own users, and we've been working on this with StopBadware.org. A few months ago we took the first step and integrated malware notifications into Webmaster Tools. I'm pleased to announce that we are now including more detailed information in these notifications, and are also sending them to site owners via email.
Webmaster Tools notifications
Now instead of simply informing site owners that their sites have been flagged and suggesting next steps, we're also showing example URLs that we've determined to be dangerous. This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. For example, a common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site. By providing example URLs, site owners are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites.
Email notifications
In addition to notifying Webmaster Tools users, we've also begun sending email notifications to some of the owners of sites that we flag for badware. We don't have a perfect process for determining a site owner's email address, so for now we're sending the notifications to likely site owner aliases for the domain in question (for example, webmaster@, admin@, etc). We considered using whois records, but these often contain contact information for the hosting provider or registrar, and you can guess what might happen if a web host learned that one of its client sites was distributing badware. We're planning to allow site owners to provide a preferred email address for notifications through Webmaster Tools, so look for this change in the future.