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Software Turns Google into a Virus Scanner

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the safe-to-click dept.

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?"

6 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Malware by the+linux+geek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Something that these 'security experts' seem to not understand is that the average user is ignorant of how computers/software work. Most users can't even be bothered to set up a password for their root/admin account. No amount of clever software is going to truly prevent the average user from loading his machine up with some form of malware. A step in the right direction would be simple things, like running as a non-root user by default.

    1. Re:Malware by Data+Link+Layer · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Thats a windows thing. Hopefully when they finally ship vista they will have a good user privilage system. A much better system compared tto beta 2 where you need to go through like seven steps just to delete a file.

    2. Re:Malware by postmortem · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well not only that, but average user has a need to install more or less- malware. The trash software industry that makes junk loaded with spuyware addware and other poorly written software, targets averageuser, not the experts. The amount of software today created, and used in world requires that main user of computer uses his root account at least sparingly. However, I see the problem of user ignorance as a problem that is not necessarily unsolvable. It is that unsafe practices of its users create additional challenge for defensive software developers that has to be taken into account. For example, see how Unix systems perform well security-wise even without anti-virus software. It is that Microsoft hasn't taken this into account when designing Windows 2000 and XP.

  2. the real story is .. by rs232 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The real story is why are we still getting 'Internet viruses' in the latter half of 2006 and why don't these 'security vendors' produce a soluton to the problem.

    --
    davecb5620@gmail.com
    1. Re:the real story is .. by kassemi · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Simply stated, because the existence of this issue is highly profitable.

      --
      What the hell's a "gewie?"
  3. Re:what a good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Blogs are the new spam. Digg is about 95% blogspam, and now slashdot too. You make a phoney blog, copy some article vertbatim from another site, flood your blog with ads, and get places like slashdot to link to it to increase your google pagerank, making it more likely that people will go to your ad-ridden site from google on searches.