Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool to the Rescue

Google have been protecting website or blog readers from malicious web pages since 2006. It is not essentially protecting dummies, but protecting all and sundry. Google doesn't keep you from viewing the website, it simply provides a warning mechanism by showing warning labels in Google's search results and by publishing the data via the SafeBrowsing API to web browsers such as Firefox and Google Desktop Search to let people know there have been problems. Is it bad that your browser tells you that a site's security certificate is expired or that you are leaving a secure connection?

Google is to be applauded for working to make the net safer. To create our data, Google have built a large-scale infrastructure to automatically determine if web pages pose a risk to readers. This system has proven to be highly accurate, but they've noted that it can sometimes be difficult for webmasters and users to verify their results, as attackers often use sophisticated obfuscation techniques or inject malicious payloads only under certain conditions. Google should rethink what they are doing to the webmasters. Before flagging a website, they should contact the webmaster. The webmaster can easily take downcast the website and effect repairs. If not, then flag it. With that in mind, Google has developed a Safe Browsing diagnostic tool that will provide detailed information about their automatic investigations and findings.

The Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page of a site will return sets of security check information about that page which structured into four different categories:

1. The current listing status of a site or blog and also information on how often a site or parts of it were listed in the past.
2. The second section includes information on when Google analyzed the page, when it was last malicious, what kind of malware Google encountered and so fourth. To help webmasters clean up their sites.
3. Did the site facilitated the distribution of malicious software in the past?
4. And last, Has this site hosted malware?

All security check information they show is historical over the last 90 days but does not go further into the past.