Google introduces an online security blog to keep users up to date with the recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security particularly malware. I wrote about Google’s efforts to identify malware sites, now they have started this blog to encourage discussion on this topic.

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.

Google”s online security team clarifies that 0.1% of the websites are malicious in nature. Google analysis shows that majority of malware activity is happening in China and US followed by Germany and Russia. See the below image to get a picture of the geographical distribution of these sites. Green color indicates that Google didnt find any suspecious activity in those locations and red indicates highly effected.

Some tips for the users to protect themselves from these attacks

First and foremost, enable automatic updates for your operating system as well your browsers, browser plugins and other applications you are using. Automatic updates ensure that your computer receives the latest security patches as they are published. We also recommend that you run an anti-virus engine that checks network traffic and files on your computer for known malware and abnormal behavior. If you want to be really sure that your system does not become permanently compromised, you might even want to run your browser in a virtual machine, which you can revert to a clean snapshot after every browsing session.

Webmasters can learn more about cleaning, and most importantly, keeping their sites secure at StopBadware.org’s Tips for Cleaning and Securing a Website.

[Google Online Security Blog]