Google Safe Browsing Alerts Now Available to Network Admins

Google has extended its Safe Browsing service to allow Autonomous System (AS) owners to be notified of malicious websites hosted in their respective IP space.

Google Safe Browsing is an API (application programming interface) which allows checking URLs against blacklists maintained by Google.

The service aggregates information from various sources and the company uses special crawlers to detect if websites load content known malicious domains.

Up to this point, the service has benefited users and webmasters alike. Users are helped indirectly through various applications that use the API.

For example, some people might be familiar with the "This site may harm your computer" warning displayed for certain Google Web search result.

Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome also use of the service. If an URL accessed inside these browsers is blacklisted in Google Safe Browsing, a big warning is displayed to users before loading it.

As far as webmasters are concerned, they can check if their websites are infected through the Google Webmaster Tools.

But now, Autonomous System owners can sign up for notifications too by going to safebrowsingalerts.googlelabs.com.

Autonomous Systems (ASs) are collections of IP addresses belonging to a particular organization and under a common Internet routing policy.

For example, Internet service providers all have unique Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) and through Google's new tool they can choose to receive alerts of infected websites pointing to IP addresses they own.

"A single network or ISP can host hundreds or thousands of different websites. Although network administrators may not be responsible for running the websites themselves, they have an interest in the quality of the content being hosted on their networks.

"We’re hoping that with this additional level of information, administrators can help make the Internet safer by working with webmasters to remove malicious content and fix security vulnerabilities," Google said on its online security blog.