Google Searches Web's Dark Side BBC News (05/11/07)
as it appeared in the May 14, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
Google researchers are studying billions of Web sites in an effort to identify all possible malicious pages on the Internet. Google researcher Niels Provos and his colleagues subjected 4.5 million Web pages to "in-depth analysis" for their paper, "Ghost in the Browser," and found about 450,000 Web pages able to launch "drive-by downloads" and an additional 700,000 potentially compromised Web pages. Drive-by downloads are malicious programs that install automatically when a user enters a "booby-trapped" site, often those with adult video thumbnails or other "interesting" content. Drive-bys frequently install themselves by taking advantage of vulnerable elements in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Virulent code often resides in widgets and banner advertisements, and forums and blog postings containing links are new channels through which criminals can attack. Hackers can hijack entire Web servers, or individual computers; they also can use drive-bys to capture sensitive information. To keep computers safe, Google alerts users with a message if they are about to visit a potentially dangerous Web site. In addition, the company is striving to detect and map all Web-based infection vectors. "Finding all the Web-based infection vectors is a significant challenge and requires almost complete knowledge of the Web as a whole," wrote the Google researchers. Click Here to View Full Article
