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There are lots of ways that hackers can get to you. They can find you on public wifi, access data through your smartphones, and send you infected emails. But the easiest route they can take is the internet, via simple web surfing. With one click of a mouse, you can end up on an infected site unknowingly, giving cyber criminals a back door to your data. But Google is trying to help. Here’s an article, from Network World, that tells us just how Google is doing it.
Google is now providing more information to website owners whose online properties are temporarily blocked as unsafe by its Safe Browsing technology as a way to help them fix the identified problems faster.
Google Safe Browsing is a technology used by Google’s search engine, the Google Chrome browser, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Android to steer users away from websites that host malicious or deceptive content.
On the back-end, Google uses robots to scan the web and build a list of websites that host malware, harmful downloads, or deceptive ads and pages. Software developers can then plug into an API to integrate this list into their own applications.
The problem is that many websites hosting malware or bad ads don’t do so intentionally but were hacked by attackers. The owners of those websites can ask Google to rescan their properties and have them removed from the Safe Browsing blacklist once the security problems have been corrected.
Webmasters are encouraged to proactively register their websites in the Search Console even if those websites have never been affected by a security issue. This will save them time when something does happen because Google will send notifications through the service as soon as Safe Browsing detects a problem.
Google estimates that more than a billion users are protected by its Safe Browsing technology, and more than 60 million of them encounter Safe Browsing warnings on a weekly basis. As of May, webmasters took around 60 days on average to clean their websites once they were notified of a compromise, according to Google’s data. This is an improvement from a 90-day average response time in May 2015.
Maintaining your network security should be your number one priority. If you think you may be a victim of malware, the computer techs at Great Lakes Computer can help. We can remove existing issues, as well as set you up with a robust antivirus program to protect you in the future.
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