Identifying Compromised Websites

linuxwrangler writes "'An infectious disease broke out recently in a number of communities. We'd like to tell which communities they were, just in case you were visiting one at the time, but we can't. It would be bad for business, after all.' Thus begins an interesting column in InfoWorld's Gripe Line in which Ed Foster discusses the astonishing secrecy surrounding the identity of the sites that were compromised by Scob/Download.ject and spreading malicious code to their visitors. As Foster notes, when food-poisoning is traced to a store or restaurant the health-department makes every effort to inform those who may be affected. Shouldn't we demand the same when a business's server poisons our computer?"

Comments

Darn Right We Should Know

[NoelWeb]

Just out of moral "niceness," we should all know if we may have visited a compromised site. The downside to this is that maybe some site owners will not report their site as being compromised in the future out of fear of losing business once word spreads.

Re:Of course

[untaken_name]

Why do you keep replying? It's none of my business? You posted it on a fucking public forum, jackass. You made it the business of anyone who wanted to reply to you. Stop making stupid mistakes that make you look like an ignorant idiot, and people will stop correcting you. (at least I will) Alternatively, you can go on looking like a fool who doesn't know the difference between 'affect' and 'effect.' Why do I care? I don't. Not about you personally; you just happened to be the fourth of fifth person I saw misusing the word effect within this thread. The decision to correct you and not each and every person who misused any word was made completely arbitrarily. However, if you keep replying to me, I'll keep replying to you. That's the way things work when you aren't in charge of who gets to talk about what.