San Francisco — For sites that are prone to vulnerabilities and cyber threats, and to help you keep tabs, global search engine leader Google over the weekend, expanded a program intended to prevent search engine users from visiting websites that could scam them or install malware on their computers with the following notification: “This site may be compromised,” the company said.
Cyber criminals break into websites and change their content to target users with spam messages or trick them into sharing personal and credit-card information, so now onwards search engine users will see a warning pop up, and will include a blue link below the title that says “This site may be compromised,” according to Mountain View, California-based Google.
“When a user visits a site, we want her to be confident the information on that site comes from the original publisher,” Gideon Wald, a Google associate product manager, said in a blog post.
“We have added new notifications to the results page to alert you when sites may have been compromised, spammed or defaced,” Google director of product management Mike Cassidy said in a blog post.
“In addition to helping users, these notices will also help webmasters more quickly discover when someone is abusing their sites.”
The new messages will appear in addition to “This site may harm your computer,” which are notifications run for years by Google of sites that may include malicious software. Clicking on that link will direct users to a Google Help Center article that explains more about its notices. Clicking the main link will take you to the actual site.
The search engine giant stated that it will try to contact webmasters of the compromised sites, and has establish a process to allow website owners to request a review of the labeling.
“Of course, we also understand that webmasters may be concerned that these notices are impacting their traffic from search. Rest assured, once the problem has been fixed, the warning label will be automatically removed from our search results, usually in a matter of days,” Wald wrote. “You can also request a review of your site to accelerate removal of the notice.”
Hackers often take advantage of vulnerabilities on legitimate sites so they can be utilized as a low-cost and sneaky platform for carrying out phishing attacks and spamming operations. Google determines that a site may have been hacked based on certain signs that it detects automatically while it is crawling and indexing its pages for its search engine.
In the past, webmasters have complained that it takes far too long for Google to remove warnings after sites are cleaned up. Wald said webmasters can contact Google and request expedited reviews once compromised websites have been disinfected.
“Rest assured, once the problem has been fixed, the warning label will be automatically removed from our search results,” said Google associate product manager Gideon Wald.
The new warnings are motivated to increase the number of websites that get flagged. The move comes as Dark Reading reported that Google, web host GoDaddy, Microsoft and other companies have formed a consortium to take down unlicensed pharmacy websites that peddle Viagra and other prescription drugs. Such rogue pharmacies, which rake in billions of dollars selling fake medicine, have proved extremely resilient against past take down attempts.
Despite campaigns like these from Google and other Internet companies, end users are always advised to use common sense and vigilance before clicking on search results and online ads.
Amazingly, just last week, cyber-criminals managed to infect online ad networks from Google and Microsoft, placing ads on them that, when clicked on, took users to sites that infected their PCs with malware, according to security consultancy Armorize.