Battling the plague of the web

The web can be a dangerous place; there are threats around every corner. In recent years, threats coming from web pages have significantly increased, from malicious programs hosted on web pages, to downloads that manipulate your computer and steal your personal information. In the past, these threats mainly came from questionable websites, but today even reputable sites can turn bad, which means that everyone is at risk for malware.

Live Search is proud to announce that starting today we are taking action against this plague. As Live Search crawls the web, we assess whether a page contains any malicious elements or exhibits any malicious behavior, and then flag questionable pages with a warning message (WARNING:  following is a real example of an infected site!):

Malware

Our primary goal is to protect you from a potentially harmful page. You can still decide to risk it and visit the page, but we strongly urge against it and recommend always following our security guide Protect Your Computer.

If a reputable web page has been flagged, the website has most likely been abused by a malicious third party. On the Live Search Webmaster Center blog, we provide webmasters with information on how to fix and secure their websites from future abuse. We also encourage webmasters to sign up for our Webmaster Tools, which can alert them when malicious content on detected on their site.

Christian Seifert, Software Design Engineer, Live Search Anti-Spam & Anti-Malware Team