Software Turns Google into a Virus Scanner

Kfleming writes "Websense, a security vendor, has developed software that uses a binary search feature built into Google to hunt down malware. Using this technique researchers at Websense have uncovered over 2,000 websites hosting malware, and are also able to detect legitimate sites that have been hacked. Could this binary search feature also be used to exploit Google and trick users into downloading malware?"

Comments

"Binary search" ?!

[shreevatsa]

Not only is this a dupe, it is also confusing that they use "binary search" to mean "searching inside binary files", and not binary search in its usual sense .

The linked article is just looking for ad revenue

[Goldenhawk]

This looks suspiciously like self-promotion, trying to win a few dollars from Google AdSense placement. Yes, folks, Google can be used to make money. Who woulda known?

Skip the linked article and go straight to the source:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,126371,0 0.asp

All the link does is duplicate the story summary, and then link to the PCWorld article.

Pardon me...

[WhiteWolf666]

But doesn't Google reliable obey Robots.txt ?

Seems like a DotBomb business plan....

Re:It started with our abuse of the word "computer

[jc42]

My wife likes to tell people that her first job title was "computer". That was back around 1970, when she got a job at a New York state surveyor's office. Her job was to do calculations required in surveying. She used several gadgets to assist in most of the calculations, of course, and those gadgets were called "calculators". Then for inexplicable reasons her job title got applied to some of the fancier calculators, so they had to change the job title to avoid the obvious confusion.

The defiition of "computer" is a bit odd. Technically it's defined as a device that stores its software in the same memory as its data. The definition doesn't actually require that it "compute" anything, though of course if it doesn't, its software is a bit pointless. But this sort of definition came about because the first programmable computing devices used different kinds of hardware to store data and programs. The idea of storing programs in writable memory was a major technical advance back in the 1940s, making it possible to write programs that manipulated other programs. This turned out to be such an important innovation that the resulting "stored-program calculators" were treated as an entirely new kind of beast, sufficiently different that a new name was needed for them.

There was a book on the topic published recently, called "When Computers Were Women".