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Posted by Panayiotis Mavrommatis,
Google Security Team

We recently began a series of
posts related to online security that focus on how we secure
information (with posts href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-google-keeps-your-information.html"
id="qyc5" >like href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/using-log-data-to-help-keep-you-safe.html"
id="kb5c" >these) and how you
can protect yourself online. Here's the latest in the series.-
Ed.

As part of this ongoing security series, we'd like to talk a
little about id="lase" >malware. The term malware, derived
from "malicious software," refers to any software
specifically designed to harm your computer or the software
it's running.

Malware can be added to your computer, with or without your
knowledge, in a number of ways — usually when you visit a website
containing malware or when you download seemingly innocent
software. It can then slow down your system, send fake emails from
your email account, steal sensitive information like credit card
numbers or passwords from your computer, and more.

The conventional wisdom was that you could avoid malware by
learning to spot sites that were created with the sole purpose of
spreading it, and by staying away from other sites that might be
risky. But href="http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2008/02/all-your-iframe-are-point-to-us.html"
id="jddj" >recent research from Google
suggests that an increasing number of malware attacks are taking
place on sites you'd normally regard as safe or legitimate, but
have actually been compromised.

Google works closely with the href="http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/11/help-us-fill-in-gaps.html"
id="kxrj" >security community to href="http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/05/introducing-googles-anti-malware.html"
id="oe4q" >identify malware on the web and
then href="http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/06/phishers-and-malware-authors-beware.html"
id="qn3p" >share that information more broadly.
We've set up a number of automated systems to scour our index
for potentially dangerous sites, and we href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=45449&topic=360&hl=en&sa=X&oi=malwarewarninglink&resnum=1&ct=help"
id="v9:q" >add a label to those that appear to be a vehicle for
malware. If you're searching on Google and click on a link that
we've flagged, a warning page will appear before you move
forward.

We also href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=45432"
id="am_8" >notify webmasters if we
discover that a site is no longer secure and provide a method for
webmasters that href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html"
id="ubgi" >clean up their sites to
href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/08/malware-reviews-via-webmaster-tools.html"
id="bkdz" >request a review. And
starting soon, we'll be providing more detail on sites that
appear to be spreading malware, so users have a better sense of why
we have flagged a given site and webmasters can more easily
identify and correct issues on their sites.

All this stems directly from our security philosophy: We believe
that if we all work together to identify threats and stamp them
out, we can make the web a safer place for everyone. Of course, we
can't catch everything, so our users play a

href="http://www.google.com/contact/security.html"
id="kp-b" >crucial part of this effort too. Below are a few tips
that can help you reduce your chances of being affected by
malware:

Use anti-virus
software. Most anti-virus software is specifically designed
to find and remove harmful software on your computer. Be sure you
have anti-virus software installed on your computer (you can get a
free trial through href="http://pack.google.com/intl/en/pack_installer.html?hl=en&gl=us"
id="a:vx" >Google Pack if you don't),
keep it current, and use it to run frequent full-system
checks.

Make sure your operating
system and browser are up to date. Attackers typically
target vulnerabilities in your href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system" id="neqc"
>operating system (OS) and your browser
to install malware on your computer. OS and browser providers
frequently release updates to close those vulnerabilities. Enable
automatic updates for both your browser and your OS, and check for
alerts to ensure you have the latest and greatest
protection.

Be careful about what you
download. While Google and everyone else in the online
community is working hard to identify harmful sites, new sources of
malware are emerging all the time. Whenever you're prompted to
download an email attachment, install a plug-in, or download an
unfamiliar piece of software, take a moment to think it through.
You won't always be able to identify a risky download, but if
you practice some reasonable caution, you'll be able to reduce
that risk.

If you come across a potentially dangerous site that hasn't
already been flagged, please href="http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/" >report
it. To learn more about malware and how to protect yourself,
check out StopBadware.org's href="http://www.stopbadware.org/home/help" id="b5qc"
>help page.

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Tags: , google, Mavrommatis, Panayiotis, Posted, recently, Security, teamWe

Posted by Ian Fette, Google Security
Team

This post is one of a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/security"
id="pxk:" >series devoted to online security. - Ed.

Millions of people have gotten "urgent" emails asking
them to take immediate action to prevent some impending disaster.
"Our bank has a new security system. Update your information
now or you won't be able to access your account," or
"We couldn't verify your information; click here to update
your account." Sometimes the email claims that something awful
will happen to the sender (or a third party), as in "The sum
of $30,000,000 is going to go to the Government unless you help me
transfer it to your bank account."

People who click on the links in these emails may see a web page
that looks like a legitimate site they've visited before.
Because the page looks familiar, these people enter their username,
password, or other private information on the site. What
they've actually done is given an unknown third party all the
information needed to hijack their account, steal their money, or
open up new lines of credit in their name. They just fell for a
phishing attack.

The concept behind such an attack is pretty simple: Someone
masquerades as someone else in an effort to fool you into sharing
personal or other sensitive information with them. Phishers can
masquerade as just about anyone, including banks, email and
application providers, online merchants, online payment services,
and even governments. And while some of these attacks are crude and
easy to spot, many of them are sophisticated and well constructed.
That fake email from "your bank" can look very real; the
bogus "login page" you're redirected to can seem
completely legitimate.

The good news is there are things you can do to steer clear of
phishing attacks:

Be careful about responding to
emails that ask you for sensitive information. You should be
wary of clicking on links in emails or responding to emails that
are asking for things like account numbers, user names and
passwords, or other personal information such as social security
numbers. Most legitimate businesses will never ask for this
information via email. Google doesn't.

Go to the site yourself,
rather than clicking on links in suspicious emails. If you
receive a communication asking for sensitive information but think
it could be legitimate, open a new browser window and go to the
organization's website as you normally would (for instance, by
using a bookmark or by typing out the address of the
organization's website). This will improve the chances that
you're dealing with the organization's website rather than
with a phisher's website, and if there's actually something
you need to do, there will usually be a notification on the site.
Also, if you're not sure about a request you've received,
don't be afraid to contact the organization directly to ask. It
takes just a few minutes to go to the organization's website,
find an email address or phone number for customer support, and
reach out to confirm whether the request is legitimate.

If you're on a site
that's asking you to enter sensitive information, check for
signs of anything suspicious. If you're on a site
that's asking for sensitive information — no matter how you
got there — check for the signs that it's really the official
website for the organization. For example, check the URL to make
sure the page is actually part of the organization's website,
and not a fraudulent page on a different domain (such as
mybankk.com or g00gle.com.) If you're on a page that should be
secured (like one asking you to enter in your credit card
information) look for "https" at the beginning of
the URL and the padlock icon in the browser. (In Firefox and
Internet Explorer 6, the padlock appears in the bottom right-hand
corner, while in Internet Explorer 7 the padlock appears on the
right-hand side of the address bar.) These signs aren't
infallible, but they're a good place to start.

Be wary of the "fabulous
offers" and "fantastic prizes" that you'll
sometimes come across on the web. If something seems too good to be
true, it probably is, and it could be a phisher trying to steal
your information. Whenever you come across an offer online that
requires you to share personal or other sensitive information to
take advantage of it, be sure to ask lots of questions and check
the site asking for your information for signs of anything
suspicious.

Use a browser that has a
phishing filter. The
latest versions of most browsers — including href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/" id="f846"
>Firefox, href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx"
id="jj0_" >Internet Explorer, and href="http://www.opera.com/" id="csp_" >Opera –
include phishing filters that can help you spot potential phishing
attacks.

All fairly simple, right? What it all comes down to is if someone
asks you to share personal or other sensitive information online,
take a moment to think through the request carefully. Doing so will
help you stay safe online, and help us all put phishers out of
business.

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Tags: , Fette, google, Ian, post, Posted, Security, teamThis

Posted by Niels Provos, Google Security
Team

We recently began two new series
of posts. The first, which explains how we harness data for our
users, started with href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-data-matters.html"
id="wkxh" >this post. The second, focusing on how we secure
information and how users can protect themselves online, style="font-style: italic;"
href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-google-keeps-your-information.html"
id="b3rt" >began here. This
post is the second installment in both series.- Ed.

We sometimes get questions on what Google does with server log
data, which registers how users are interacting with our services.
We take great care in protecting this data, and while we've
talked previously about href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-data-matters.html"
id="gjr1" >some of the ways it can be
useful, something we haven't covered yet are the ways it can
help us make Google products safer for our users.

While the Internet on the whole is a safe place, and most of us
will never fall victim to an attack, there are more than a few
threats out there, and href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-google-keeps-your-information.html"
id="syc9" >we do everything we
can to help you stay a step ahead of them. Any information we
can gather on how attacks are launched and propagated helps us do
so.

That's where server log data comes in. We analyze logs for
anomalies or other clues that might suggest malware or phishing
attacks in our search results, attacks on our products and
services, and other threats to our users. And because we have a
reasonably significant data sample, with logs stretching back
several months, we're able to perform aggregate, long-term
analyses that can uncover new security threats, provide greater
understanding of how previous threats impacted our users, and help
us ensure that our threat detection and prevention measures are
properly tuned.

We can't share too much detail (we need to be careful not to
provide too many clues on what we look for), but we can use
historical examples to give you a better idea of how this kind of
data can be useful. One good example is the href="http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/search_worms.pdf"
id="ujjv" >Santy search worm
(PDF), which first appeared in late 2004. Santy used combinations
of search terms on Google to identify and then infect vulnerable
web servers. Once a web server was infected, it became part of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet" id="or.e"
>botnet and started searching Google for more
vulnerable servers. Spreading in this way, Santy quickly infected
thousands and thousands of web servers across the Internet.

As soon as Google recognized the attack, we began developing a
series of tools to automatically generate " href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression" >regular
expressions" that could identify potential Santy queries
and then block them from accessing Google.com or flag them for
further attention. But because regular expressions like these can
sometimes snag legitimate user queries too, we designed the tools
so they'd test new expressions in our server log databases
first, in order to determine how each one would affect actual user
queries. If it turned out that a regular expression affected too
many legitimate user queries, the tools would automatically adjust
the expression, analyze its performance against the log data again,
and then repeat the process as many times as necessary.

In this instance, having access to a good sample of log data meant
we were able to refine one of our automated security processes, and
the result was a more effective resolution of the problem. In other
instances, the data has proven useful in minimizing certain
security threats, or in preventing others completely. In the end,
what this means is that whenever you use Google search, or Google
Apps, or any of our other services, your interactions with those
products helps us learn more about security threats that could
impact your online experience. And the better the data we have, the
more effectively we can protect all our users.

Tags: , google, Niels, Posted, Provos, recently, Security, teamWe

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Tags: , AdSense, google, Internet, Norton, Security, sometimes, spark

Tags: , AdSense, google, Internet, Norton, Security, sometimes, spark