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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.'"
Hax-fu?
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!
Beep beep.
Maybe, but any reduction in the number of infected PCs is win for the entire net.
A complicated error is indistinguishable from a feature.
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...
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Do Linux or Apple users not mind when a bot-net army takes down a website they are trying to access, or clogs the pipes?
Do Linux or Apple users not mind all the spam to their inbox from hijacked machines?
Do Linux or Apple users not have to worry about some family member being taken in by a phishing scheme, hosted on a hijacked machine?
Do Linux or Apple users not mind tons of hijacked machines probing any SSH or other ports you might have open, looking for vulnerabilities or doing dictionary password attacks?
Less hijacked machines on the internet helps us all. Be you a Windows, Linux, Apple, BSD, or other user. Not caring about hijacked windows boxes because you are leet enough to use Linux is stupid.
Here's the actual paper. It's a Usenix paper.
What they're doing is straightforward, and it's much like what many virus scanners do. First, they look at web pages to see if there's anything suspicious that requires further analysis. If there is, they load the page into Internet Explorer (of course) in a virtual machine, and see if it changes its environment. The better virus scanners have been doing something like that for a few years now, running possible viruses in some kind of sandbox. Although they usually don't go all the way and run Internet Explorer in a virtual machine. (Are you allowed to do that under Microsoft's current EULA for IE 7?)
The main problem with Google's approach here is that it's after the fact. They won't notice a bad page until the next time they crawl it. Bad pages come and go so fast today that they'll always be behind. As the paper says, "Since many of the malicious URLs are too short-lived to provide statistically meaningful data, we analyzed only the URLs whose presence on the Internet lasted longer than one week."
If Google implements this, the main effect will be to push attackers into changing site names for attack sites even faster.
It's all so backward. What we need is to run most of Internet Explorer in a tightly sandboxed environment on the user's machine, so that when you close the window, any browser damage goes away. That would actually work.
Since morality is defined by the desire to limit human suffering, protecting innocent people who don't know better from malware is always going to be for a greater good. People shouldn't have to get their OS reloaded every few months.
Not running your choice of OS doesn't make them bad, and is a startling simplistic world view. There's no "helping Microsoft" here; they are trying to protect all Internet users. Since those people are using Google search, it's really more like trying to serve their customers better. Since all their customers are Internet users; so ask yourself: what is concern #1 amongst Internet users?