14 DAY TRIAL // The Mountain View company is continuously striving to improve the security of the results provided by its technologies, but until now, most of its utilities reduced the threats only up to a small percent. However, Google wants even more and partnered with MySpace to block a lot of phishing websites that threatened the users with fake information.
"In late March, we reached out to MySpace to see what we could do to help. We provided lists of the top phishing sites and our anti-phishing blacklist to MySpace so that they could disable compromised accounts with links to those sites," Colin Whittaker, Anti-Phishing Team at Google, said today.
However, the campaign against malicious pages didn't stop here because most of the websites that included phishing links didn't remove the dangerous content. Moreover, some of the MySpace users published this links into their profile. To resolve this problem, the MySpace employees designed a new system to allow them to modify the signatures without the members' approval.
"On April 19, MySpace updated their server software so that they could disable bad links in users' profiles without requiring any user action or altering any other profile content. Overnight, overall phishing traffic dropped by a factor of five back to the levels observed in early March. While MySpace phishing continues at much lower volumes, phishers are beginning to move on to new targets," the Google employee added.
In the recent period, Google struggled to improve the security of its search technologies, releasing two types of malware notifications, both of them being available on the search engine result page. One of the alerts is displayed straight under the link provided by the search tool while the second one appears right when the user clicks on a dangerous link. These notifications are based on a partnership with StopBadware, a company that flags the malicious pages as dangerous and sends the information to Google.