Google is preparing to identify sites spreading malicious software which can harm the users PCs. If you remember recent hack a mac day contest winner hacked the mac by exploiting a bug in the quick time through a malicious site. These malicious sites look normal and users doesn’t know how they will spoil the system or install viruses. Google will use software to identify these sites and accordingly label them as harmful websites in its search results. This will help a lot of innocent users who doesn’t know about these sites.

Google security specialist Niels Provos tells New Scientist,

As users have grown wary of email attachments and installed firewalls and anti-virus software, however, the bad guys have shifted their attentions to websites in a bid to find more victims …

To address this problem and to protect users from being infected while browsing the web, we have started an effort to identify all web pages on the Internet that could potentially be malicious. Google already crawls billions of web pages on the Internet. We apply simple heuristics to the crawled pages repository to determine which pages attempt to exploit web browsers. The heuristics reduce the number of URLs we subject to further processing significantly. The pages classified as potentially malicious are used as input to instrumented browser instances running under virtual machines. Our goal is to observe the malware behavior when visiting malicious URLs and discover if malware binaries are being downloaded as a result of visiting a URL. Web sites that have been identified as malicious, using our verification procedure, are labeled as potentially harmful when returned as a search result. Marking pages with a label allows users to avoid exposure to such sites and results in fewer users being infected.

Rough Type wrote about this and Mattcutts explained it here

This reminds of McAfees’s Site Advisor, this is available as add-on for firefox and IE. After installing this it shows a small icon in the search results which tell you about the site.

Source: Rough Type

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