Mountain View, California — In an attempt to keep its hands clean and browsing the web a safer place, search engine titan Google announces its innovative alarm system for Safe Browsing notifications about compromised websites sent to network administrators allows them to detect phishing URLs.
The new phishing alert is part of Google Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators, a service unveiled in September as an “experimental tool” that aggregates data from various URL blacklists, as well as Google’s own malware sensors.
The accumulated intelligence is offered for free to consumers, webmasters and network administrators alike running their own networks, to receive e-mail notifications indicating bad URLs if Google’s automated scanners find malicious content.
“A single network or ISP can host hundreds or thousands of different Websites,” Google security team members Nav Jagpal and Ke Wang wrote at the time in a joint blog post. “Although network administrators may not be responsible for running the Websites themselves, they have an interest in the quality of the content being hosted on their networks. We are hoping that with this additional level of information, administrators can help make the Internet safer by working with Webmasters to remove malicious content and fix security vulnerabilities.”
Google last week said that it has added a new notification feature for phishing URLs to the mix, and e-mails warnings to administrators. Phishing sites try to obtain personal information from a victim, often by deceiving them into believing the page they have landed on is legitimate.
“Today we are adding phishing URLs to the notification messages. This means that in addition to being alerted to compromised URLs found on networks, you will be alerted to phishing URLs as well,” Google announces via its Online Security Blog.
End-user products can tap into this data mine via an open API (application programming interface). For example, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome both check URLs through the service and block access to them if they are listed as malicious. Webmasters can verify if their websites are affected from their Google Webmaster Tools accounts and since late last month, AS admins can also sign up to receive alerts about bad URLs on their networks.
“We would also like to point out the XML notification feature,” Jagpal wrote Oct. 14. “By default, we send notification messages in a simple e-mail message. However, we realize that some of you may want to process these notifications by a script, so we have added the ability to receive messages in XML format. Click on an AS in your list to modify preferences, such as enabling the XML notification feature.”
To begin receiving such notifications, network administrators must first register with Google’s Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators site.