Hi all,
    Google launched, last week, a security blog. Titled Google Online Security Blog, this weblog is intended at fighting malware and spyware, and making people aware of the security threats online.

Online security is an important topic for Google, our users, and anyone who uses the Internet. The related issues are complex and dynamic and we’ve been looking for a way to foster discussion on the topic and keep users informed. Thus, we’ve started this blog where we hope to periodically provide updates on recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security. Among the issues we’ll tackle is malware, which is the subject of our inaugural post.

Malware — surreptitious software capable of stealing sensitive information from your computer — is increasingly spreading over the web. Visiting a compromised web server with a vulnerable browser or plugins can result in your system being infected with a whole variety of malware without any interaction on your part. Software installations that leverage exploits are termed “drive-by downloads”. To protect Google’s users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search.

Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. Using targeted feature extraction and classification, we select a subset of URLs believed to be suspicious for in-depth investigation. So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their web servers have been compromised.

    The basic advices are the same -

• Keep software updated
• Avoid visiting untrustworthy websites
• Use antivirus programs, and keep them up to date
• Never give out personal information on the net

    I believe that this blog will serve as a basement for all future Google security updates. Its a great initiative by the company, and very much on time!

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