Google to be Our Web-Based Anti-Virus Protector ?

cyberianpan writes "For some time now, searches have displayed 'this site may harm your computer' when Google has tagged a site as containing malware. Now the search engine giant is is further publicizing the level of infection in a paper titled: The Ghost In The Browser. For good reason, too: the company found that nearly 1 in ten sites (or about 450,000) are loaded with malicious software. Google is now promising to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious - with its powerful crawling abilities & data centers, the company is in an excellent position to do this. 'As well as characterizing the scale of the problem on the net, the Google study analyzed the main methods by which criminals inject malicious code on to innocent web pages. It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets. Widgets are small programs that may, for example, display a calendar on a webpage or a web traffic counter. These are often downloaded form third party sites. The rise of web 2.0 and user-generated content gave criminals other channels, or vectors, of attack, it found.'"

Comments

Huh

[Realistic_Dragon]

I browse the internet on my Linux box, running OS X with MacOnLinux. On OS X I run VMWare player hosting FreeBSD, where I have all the options turned to OFF. That runs Firefox, which connects to a web-2.0 version of Lynx. I use this to connect to another site which manually lets me enter netcat commands and read the result.

My only complaint is that the pirates at Macrodobe STILL won't support my platform of choice! When will there be a flash player for people like me!

right..

[mastershake_phd]

It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets.
 
So google is going to protect us from webpages that use less than reputable advertising and widget services. Hmm, maybe google should go into the advertising and widget service, oh wait...