In a report by StopBadware.org, U.S. based Google is ranked 5th in hosting sites which are infected “badware” or attempts to deliver what we commonly called Malware. The top four sites on the list are all based in China.
After analyzing 200,000 sites, the report found 4,261 infected sites hosted by Google which may be small compared to the 48,834 infected sites found on #1 Chinanet-Backbone.
The majority of the problems I’ve seen have been on Google based newsgroups and their blogspot Blog hosting service. Google has made creating a Blogspot account so easy that it’s easily abused. Due to spam filters I was forced to create a BitsFromBill.com domain to use in my Email signature. This address just redirects users to this page but when I included billpstudios.blogspot.com in my Emails’ many spam filters blocked me. Ironically, I first disovered this when an Email to a friend at StopBadware.org bounced back.
Now here’s the twist. Google.com is a major sponsor and a one of the founding sponsors of StopBadware.org. I give them a lot of credit for helping to make this report available. Google has made an effort to take down malware sites as quickly as they can but it’s daunting task. Obviously, they still need to re-evaluate some of their procedures.