I was recently and abruptly introduced to the organization stopbadware.org when one of my clients sent me an email letting me know that Google was identifying her site as a possible spreader of badware. What is badware, you ask? Computer programs that take over users PC’s (mostly Windows PC’s) and then do things like log keystrokes to try and find credit card information and set up mail servers to send out spam. Often users don’t even know that they have badware installed, though the symptoms include slowdowns and sometimes complete shutdowns.
Is badware bad? Yes. Is it a problem for many, many people? Yes. As computer consultants, we spend a good amount of time cleaning badware off users pc’s (just want to point out again, not Macs, if you’re on a Mac, you’re luckily out of the badware loop).
Was my client’s site distributing badware? Maybe. Sometimes a hacker gets into a web server and alters web pages so they distribute the nasty stuff all without the owner of the site knowing. We were hacked a long time ago (thank you very much, frogee). The only vestiges of the hacking was a Dreamweaver lock file, that the hacker had changed so that it read something like ‘You’ve been hacked by the Cyber Overlord.’ As far as I could tell, that’s all the hacker did, overwrite our files to say we’d been hacked. So after the attack, I uploaded our files again and we were fine.
I mention this because that’s the only thing I can think of that could have triggered Google reporting us as spreading badware. I couldn’t find any of the hacks mentioned on forums (1 pixel frames, certain javascript). It’s a small site, less than 10 pages, not that hard to search. But I also couldn’t say for sure that there wasn’t something there I was missing.
It didn’t help that Google wouldn’t tell me why my site had been flagged. They sent me over to stopbadware.org, where I had to ask that my site be reviewed. They suggest you clean out the badware first, of course. I couldn’t find any, though I did re-upload the site and take down all those lock files. I also ran the site through a couple of online services that look for badware and it came out clean.
Our site was reviewed and I received an email saying we were clean. That was a relief, but still not a great experience. Was there badware on the site? Or were we flagged somehow because of that dreamwearver lock file? There doesn’t seem to be any way to find out.
And the all clean email included this ominous paragraph:
Please note that we will be retesting your website at periodic intervals in order to monitor that it remains free from badware. If we find that you are hosting or distributing badware in the future, the reviews process may take considerably longer than the original review.
The Bottom Line
Google can pretty much do what it wants with its search results, I’m not paying them, they don’t owe me anything. I understand why they are being so closed mouthed about what sent up the flag: they don’t want the badware distributors to game the system like some search engine optimizers have done since the start of Google. I’m not sure that it’s as important to be as secretive with badware as it is with search results, but that’s how Google has always done business.
However, there does seem to be a difference between page rank (where a site is put in the search results, 1 or 1,000) and actually flagging a site as spreading badware. Yes, Google says the site ‘might’ be spreading badware, but I bet that most people ignore that ‘might.’ After all, if Google thinks the site is doing it, the site is doing it. In many internet users’ minds, Google is the internet.
And there’s no arguing that being flagged as bad by Google immediately affects a site’s buisiness.
Is this going to help cut down on people’s computers being infected with badware? I’m not sure. I’ve only seen it from the other side, since I’ve never had one of these ‘possible spreaders of badware’ sites show up on my google searches.
I suppose I would be less frustrated if they had actually shown me what was triggering the flag, so I could fix it, instead of re-submitting my site and holding my breath, hoping that I didn’t get flagged again.
Oh, and by the way, I dislike the term ‘badware.’ It sounds like someone is being naughty. I prefer the term ‘malware,’ but that’s not what the organization decided to call themselves.
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