Web Security News

Google provides malware detection tools for webmasters

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Google announced Monday that it has added malware details to its Webmaster Tools to help website administrators locate and remove malicious code.

Google's search engine and web browsers including Firefox, Chrome and Safari automatically scan websites for malware, which provides web users with a warning that the page may be infected before directing them to the site.

The company said on its security blog that the Webmaster Tools malware details feature will help site administrators get their websites cleaned up of malware in malicious HTML tags, Javascript and Flash files that may have been injected into the site by attackers.

"While it is important to protect users, we also know that most of these sites are not intentionally distributing malware," Google's Lucas Ballard explained on the blog. "We understand the frustration of webmasters whose sites have been compromised without their knowledge and who discover that their site has been flagged."

Webmasters will see a list of their pages flagged for malware distribution and samples of the malicious content that Google's scanners encountered.

Cybercriminals frequently target legitimate websites for distribution of malware through attacks known as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection.

The Firefox web browser will soon feature a technology called Content Security Policy which the company said would block XSS hacker attacks from websites injected with malicious code.