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Google Improves Safe Browsing to Help Site Owners Fight Malware

Google Improves Safe Browsing to Help Site Owners Fight Malware

By Sanket Vijayasarathy | Updated: 8 September 2016 13:01 IST

Highlights

Googles Safe Browsing initiative has seen a major expansion
Apart from warning users, the initiative warns website owners
Google now shows webmasters detailed reasons for a block

Google has been trying to fight the growing threat of cybercrime with its Safe Browsing initiative that among other things warns users if a website is potentially unsafe or has been hijacked. Affected websites are labelled with a malware warning to inform people why the site has been blocked and owners to fix the malware.

In an attempt to help website owners understand the reasons for blocks, Google has now updated the information available in Search Console in the Security Issues report to provide more, detailed explanations of six different security issues detected by Safe Browsing, including malware, deceptive pages, harmful downloads, and uncommon downloads. Once the malware has been highlighted, Google also suggests various courses of action (tailored for each type of issue) that the user can take to address the source of the problem.

(Also see: Google Will Now Warn You About Websites With Misleading 'Download' Buttons)

The company's Safe Browsing team said in a blog post that, "We on the Safe Browsing team definitely recommend registering your site in Search Console even if it is not currently experiencing a security issue. We send notifications through Search Console so webmasters can address any issues that appear as quickly as possible."

There's no denying that today's digital age is very vulnerable to cybercrimes. Just in the past few weeks we've heard of hackers auctioning NSA's surveillance tools and the leaking of Last.fm's user data. It's safe to say that the Internet and everything on it is up for grabs. Google, for its part, is trying to curb the problem, seeing as how its search engine is used by almost everyone on the planet with an access to the internet.

"Our goal is to help webmasters provide a safe and secure browsing experience for their users."

(Also see: Google Study Reveals 760,935 Websites Were Breached Last Year)

These new features not only help Google in making its own search engine safer for users but they also make it easier for site owners, especially the less technical owners, to find the root cause of the malware and fix it before the site (and potentially personal information) is compromised.

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