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30 November 2007, 12:49

Google takes malicious websites out of its index

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The US media report that Google and Microsoft Live have removed from their search indices thousands of websites known to spread contaminants. The search engine providers are thereby reacting to information provided by security firm Sunbelt, which has published a report in its blog about hits leading to infected websites. Sunbelt alleges that Yahoo continues to index these websites and search them with a crawler. However, Sunbelt did comment that Yahoo had requested a list of suspicious websites.

By taking this action, Google and Microsoft are attempting to keep unsuspecting users from landing on a malicious website by clicking on a hit. Sunbelt says that users are presented with tens of thousands of websites containing root kits, video codecs with backdoors, and manipulated Iframes in the list of hits for alternative router firmware or instructions for Excel. Yahoo reportedly indexes fewer suspect websites than Google, allegedly because Google's indexes sites more swiftly. This summer, however, McAfee found that Yahoo provided the most hits to risky sites.

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(mba)

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