Google Adds Data About Malware To Transparency Report

Nerval's Lobster writes "Google is adding data about malware to its Transparency Report. For the past seven years, the search-engine giant has offered a Safe Browsing program that warns Web-surfers about unsafe Websites (i.e., those loaded with malware or phishing scams). The new section of the Transparency Report will show how many people see those Safe Browsing warnings on a weekly basis, along with other malware-related tidbits, including Webmaster response times to threats and Website reinfection rates. The data includes malware distribution by autonomous systems, which are one (or more) networks controlled by a single entity such as a university or ISP. 'This data is part of our effort to support a safer and more secure web,' read Google's explanatory note in the Report. 'By sharing information from our scans, we hope to encourage cooperation among those who battle malware.' Google takes all that autonomous system data and breaks it down by country. For example, of the 31 million Websites in the United States scanned by Google, roughly 2 percent host malware. In other words, this data just reinforces what pretty much everybody knows: it's not a safe Internet out there."

Re:

[AliasMarlowe]

Surely the NSA is the biggest piece of Malware out there right now, I hope google added them to this list.

One of the biggest distributors of malware, certainly, but they outsource this function to numerous others (possibly including Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc.). The NSA is probably also one of the biggest purchasers of malware [zdnet.com].

Will they include ...

[DavidClarkeHR]

Being warned against malware is great - on the other hand, I don't tend to use the internet (or my computer) in a way that would make me susceptible to most infections.

Now, being warned about potential government spying on the other hand ... that would be useful.

Re:

[auric_dude]

Sounds like a man in the middle attack where Google alters and amends the data returning from the site you wish to visit, but, they are at least polite enough to inform you of their intervention.

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[tukang]

I don't tend to use the internet (or my computer) in a way that would make me susceptible to most infections

Vast majority of malware attacks spawned from legit sites [arstechnica.com]

Robots.txt

[stewsters]

User-agent: * Disallow: /virus.exe

Re:

[pr0fessor]

I'm not so sure that is accurate the number of sites scanned in the US is around 14 Billion but none of the other countries had more than 1 million scanned. I'm not sure how that skews the results since I have no idea how many sites are in each country. India had 25k sites scanned but has a population of around 1.2 Billion compared to the US 313 million.

What do we know, we know

[Stan92057]

What do we know, we know what sites are bad. We know what IP addresses are bad, we know what software is bad. Well woopdefuckingdo all that knowledge and none has the balls enough to actually DO something to stop them. The stinking NSA knows who the bad guys are but cant do anything because they are breaking the law by spying on people so they cant do anything. I keep getting and reporting child porn spam messages. I even called the FBI ya know what they said?? Just delete it thats it just delete it and hun