Google Incorporated has enhanced the way it notifies webmasters that their sites contain malware. The Mountain View, California-based company improved a service it launched in November 2006 in a partnership with The Stop Badware Coalition, a nonprofit organization led by Harvard University and the University of Oxford. The Stop Badware Coalition is backed by Google, Lenovo Group Ltd. and Sun Microsystems Inc. In August, Google started displaying malware alerts for users of its search engine.
Before the upgrade, Google informed webmasters that their sites had been identified as having malware and made generic suggestions for fixing the problem, by placing a note in the site's summary page in Google's Webmaster Tools site. The search giant now provides more detailed alerts, including pointing out the specific offending pages, and sends these notifications to webmasters via e-mail. "This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites," a Google blog entry reads.
News source: PC World
