Archives

Easy Malware Diagnostics For Your Site Using Google

By Dan Morrill
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-09-11

Interesting little handy trick for seeing if your web site has been listed as malware, with a nice diagnostic screen for you to use on any web site out there. If you have been tagged as a malware delivery site, this diagnostic can give you a very good idea of what to look for.

The Google construct is very easy:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.techwag.com

You can poke in any web site you want after diagnostic?site= Your Site Here

What is interesting is that this functionality to help determine if a site is malware or not malware has been a big issue for people with the recent Firefox 3.0 upgrade (that I am using, so imagine my surprise when I find a site I have been going to for years suddenly ends up as malware). While the upgrade is a good idea, people can still proceed on, the idea is that web masters might "suddenly" find out that their site has been hacked, and this is the only way they are going to know about it.

While this causes problems in the longer run, and it can take Google upwards of two weeks to fix the flag in their system for your web site (much to the chagrin of many webmasters), periodically checking the safe browsing link might just help you if you ever get hacked.

Comments
About the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community.