Monday, August 13, 2007 at 12:27 PM
In the past year, the number of sites affected by malware/badware grew from a handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for webmasters of affected sites -- suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post "About badware warnings" as well as the stopbadware discussion group. Now, Webmaster Tools provides malware reviews.
If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through malware-labeled search results or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we've streamlined the process to review your site and return it malware-label-free in our search results:
- View a sample of the dangerous URLs on your site in Webmaster Tools.
- Make any necessary changes to your site according to StopBadware.org's Security tips.
- New: Request a malware review from Google and we'll evaluate your site.
- New: Check the status of your review.
- If we feel the site is still harmful, we'll provide an updated list of remaining dangerous URLs
- If we've determined the site to be clean, you can expect removal of malware messages in the near future (usually within 24 hours).
We encourage all webmasters to become familiar with Stopbadware's malware prevention tips. If you have additional questions, please review our documentation or post to the discussion group. We hope you find this new feature in Webmaster Tools useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems, and thanks for your diligence for awareness and prevention of malware.
20 comments:
I think this is great - it's always been Google's goal to bring the user th best results in a search, and on top of the IE browser detecting phishing websites, this helps the user feel safer on the web, and you know I have always been an advocate of the user.
I agree, i think automatic (and more and more consistent) communication with the webmaster is great.
Dear,
I want that all my pages ,posts on my blog i.e. http://vikramjeetsing.blogspot.com/ be indexed by google.
please let me know if any robots.txt file is present or not. if yes, how to remove ?
My main aim is to index all my pages completely!!!!
please reply at vikramjeetsing@gmail.com
Thanks
This is great!
Does this apply only for pages identified by Google or also for any of StopBadWare's partners?
Even just covering Google's submitted pages would be good, considering Google seems to find the majority of the effected pages but if all StopBadWare partners' identified pages could be handled through the webmaster tools console, that would be much better.
On a related note, what about StopBadWare's review process? Is that sync'd with Google's process or still independent?
Lastly, I haven't yet seen any of the possibly new interstitial warnings, do they now contain a link to the Webmaster Tools?
A much awaited and useful feature. Thanks!
I have to comment about this, as this feature of Webmaster Tools is having a big impact on my business. I am a professional web master, with years of experiences, and dozens of successful sites under my belt. I recently started to use Webmaster Tools, primarily for the site mapping function. It has only brought me grief so far, and, based on my experience, I would not recommend that other webmasters use this feature of their Google account either.
The main issue that I have been having is with the malware reviews that I am having on my sites, which only seemed to have started once I added these sites to my Webmaster Tools account. Let me explain in detail what happened for one web site:
1. I entered the website into my Webmaster Tools account.
2. A few weeks later, I find a "your site has malware on it" email in my spam folder. I have no idea how long my site has been labeled with this warning in the search results.
3. I check out the site, get other people to check it out, and cannot find any malware. I go through the code of every page, and make sure that some errant javascript is not causing this warning to happen. My site is an open-source cms that uses php, mysql, javascript and smarty templates to run. It's very possible that any of these things could have set off the malware warning, even though they are standard features of many cms sites.
4. I request a review of my site, and, a day later I get a message that my site "has been found clean", and that the warnings will be removed. Ok, fair enough, that was annoying, but as long as the warning is removed quickly, it's no biggie.
5. Of course, as I watch the site search results for over a week, the warning does not get removed from the search results. Each day I see a drop in my traffic, and I have to deal with angry site advertisers who want to know what is happening.
6. So I request another review, and get the same "your site was found to be clean" reponse again. Yet the warnings are still not removed. On one of these re-requests, the response I get back is that the site has malware on it (the original message, again!). This makes me think that whomever is reviewing the site does not have the technical skills to see that it is perhaps just the way the site is created that is causing the warning, or, it makes me think that whomever is reviewing the site cannot see the previous history of "your site is clean" messages coming back to me. This is very frustrating, and I feel like I am voicing my concerns to a brick wall.
7. Finally, after 3 weeks of waiting, the warnings are removed from the search results.
8. This lasts about 1 day, and then I get another "your site has malware on it" email...and the whole process starts all over again!!!!!
Seriously, what is going on over there? This whole process has been very frustrating to me, and has caused a drop in traffic which I must now bounce back from. And for what, a technical flag or human reviewer that cannot distinguish real malware from a content-management system that uses javascript? I'm not against fighting malware, but the way you are going about this process is going to alienate MANY people from using Webmaster Tools. Unless you improve the flagging and response process, I am going to strongly recommend to anyone who asks me NOT to use Webmaster Tools....it's just not worth the headache if you are given a false malware review, as I was.
PLEASE fix or change the process of these malware reviews!
I am in exactly the same boat the above poster is in.
I have had 2 reviews and the first time they said javascript ad code from chitika was the cause and when I disputed that they said my own ad server was the cause even though it is openads that is used by hundreds of thousands of sites.
I think they just pick random javascript and use that as an excuse to flag your site when they don't know why it was.
They claim no false positives but I don't think that is possible as there is no way they can know what every javascript does using an automatic scanning process.
I don't think it will be long before some law suits appear because of this.
I had to comment on this post again, as my saga with the malware reviews is not yet over, it seems. After over a month of false malware reviews, and watching the traffic I had built up over several years be reduced in half, I have had enough, and I removed all my content from this domain, and then added it back in, but by bit, watching to see how the malware review status would change as I did so. For one day, the warnings in my Webmaster Tools account dissapeared....and I thought that this would be the end of it, for once and for all. But now I have another positive malware review for this site again!!!! The site barely has any content, has no javascript, and I recently cleaned out the entire site root... I do not have malware!
SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH THIS REVIEW PROCESS... GOOGLE, PLEASE FIX IT!!!
I wish I had never signed up for Webmaster Tools... it made all my hard work go down the drain....
Hi Panayiotis,
I think this is an interesting initiative if slightly flawed.
I think that for sites that are compromised this is potentially an excellent tool to help them solve the problem.
BUT for sites that are attacked by rogue adverts from advertising networks the Google solution is missplaced.
When you put this annoying notice on a sites links you suggest people don't go but you don't solve the problem becasue the advert that is at fault is being displayed probably on 1,000s if not 10,000s of sites aroudn the net.
Surely a much better solution would be to inform and educate the webmaster of the problem AND and most importantly inform the advertising network at fault and stop them delivering that advert not just to the site that you have spotted but all sites that are getting the rogue advert.
My company;s site had been infected by hackers .Google shows it as badware , BUT WE HAVE CLEANNED IT SINCE FIRST DAYS OF SEPTEMBER and since August our site www.sigma-sa.com is shown as infected causing us great commercial damage.Our webmaster and me the owner have sent requests for review but nothing changed .What can I do ?
try this program soup:
spybot s&d, adaware se, avast anti-virus, and xp tools pro. That will keep your computer running as good as new. Run spybot first, then run adaware and avast at the same time to instigate the domant spyware. After those scans are done clean your registry with xp tools pro. Its important to let avasts boot up scan complete. enjoy using this ive never had sny problems with my comp.
but my typing could use some work :)
According to our review of your website, your site contains a
potentially damaging exploit. For example, the source code for
www.a-mail.info/faceandsound/ contains the following suspicious code:
script language="JavaScript"
src="http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/smb/js/hosting/cp/js_source/geov2_001.js"> script script
language="javascript" geovisit(); script
_______________________________________PLEASE NOTE I TOOK OUT TAG BRACKETS IN ORDER TO POST ON THIS BLOG.
I contacted Yahoo and this is what they said about stopbadwares unwarrented determination:
The code that is "generated by server" at the bottom of your Yahoo! Web
Hosting pages is for the purpose of generating your site statistics and
for the functionality of the Web Hosting counter (if you have one on
your page).
NOTE: If you choose to do this, your site statistics and counter (if
you
have one) will be disabled.
__________________________________
In any case I disabled this yahoo feature. So now I can't get any site statistics and GOOGLE and stopbadware have not reviewed my site which continues to receive the negative designation
Google has this blog which they don't appear to read and I have never recieved and communication from google or stopbadware.org. The poster who said they randomly target script and don't know why is correct. Here is the evidence.
Hi, M Ferry--
We do read the comments on this blog, but we don't generally use this space for diagnosing people's site-specific issues. If you'd like someone to look into your situation in more depth, please post the URL(s) and details in our Webmaster Help Group.
Hi,
i want to scan the file for virus while uploaing on the server.
Is there any way to do that. Its good if its done by javascript
IE browser detecting phishing websites My Web Sites mp3 indir
I think this is Great also except for one thing. We work hard to run a Clean Site and Do.
Some how we have been listed as a Site with Malware or Badware, which is simply not true.
Take a look at the Report from stopbadware.org:
StopBadware has received a review request for this site. The review status was last updated on 03/06/2008
Status: Review request received: This site is in queue for review. as of 03/06/2008
StopBadware has received a review request for this site. The review status was last updated on 03/05/2008
Status: Review closed: Google has removed the warning for this site. as of 03/06/2008
StopBadware has received a review request for this site. The review status was last updated on 02/20/2008
Status: Review closed: StopBadware testing found one or more badware behaviors on this site. as of 03/04/2008
Always to your success,
Steve (Beef) Sloan
CEO Founder,
Community Marketing University
To provide a great service comes also a commitment to the users of good follow through.
I would like to see the reviews actioned quickly and not just bots, real people.
How do you keep in top of such a big market with such a complex issue is my query?
I too wonder if its giving false claims a listen to and just taking them as the request comes in, not having a thorough check before this tag goes up on your site.
A few questions & issues right now.
Lisa Lomas
Hi,
Domain name is www.anupampackers.com
whenever we search our website in google search bar it shows an message "This site may harm your computer" From past 4 month our website is infected with badware, we already scanned and upload to server.website scanning report shows that there is no badware in our website.
we have send many request to google webmster to reconsideration but still no reply, We have got many response from webmsters that our site is injected with badware website.
Please resolve our website problem and inform google to reconsideration of our website Due to this we are down in our business market.
Please do our needful it is very urent. reply to us at the given belove email ids;
techtrendz@gmail.com
info@anupampackers.com
I hope you will understand our issue and and reply to us soon.......
Regards,
Webmaster
Hi everyone,
Since several months have passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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