Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators

Posted by Nav Jagpal and Ke Wang, Security Team

Google has been working hard to protect its users from malicious web pages, and also to help webmasters keep their websites clean. When we find malicious content on websites, we attempt to notify their webmasters via email about the bad URLs. There is even a Webmaster Tools feature that helps webmasters identify specific malicious content that has been surreptitiously added to their sites, so that they can clean up their site and help prevent it from being compromised in the future.

Today, we’re happy to announce Google Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators -- an experimental tool which allows Autonomous System (AS) owners to receive early notifications for malicious content found on their networks. A single network or ISP can host hundreds or thousands of different websites. Although network administrators may not be responsible for running the websites themselves, they have an interest in the quality of the content being hosted on their networks. We’re hoping that with this additional level of information, administrators can help make the Internet safer by working with webmasters to remove malicious content and fix security vulnerabilities.

To get started, visit safebrowsingalerts.googlelabs.com.

Moving security beyond passwords

Posted by Travis McCoy, Product Manager, Google Security Team

Entering your username and password on a standard website gives you access to everything from your email and bank accounts to your favorite social networking site. Your passwords possess a lot of power, so it's critical to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. Unfortunately, we often find that passwords are the weakest link in the security chain. Keeping track of many passwords is a pain, and unfortunately accounts are regularly compromised when passwords are too weak, are reused across websites, or when people are tricked into sharing their password with someone untrustworthy. These are difficult industry problems to solve, and when re-thinking the traditional username/password design, we wanted to do more.

As we explained today on our Google Enterprise Blog, we've developed an option to add two-step verification to Google Apps accounts. When signing in, Google will send a verification code to your phone, or let you generate one yourself using an application on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device. Entering this code, in addition to a normal password, gives us a strong indication that the person signing in is actually you. This new feature significantly improves the security of your Google Account, as it requires not only something you know: your username and password, but also something that only you should have: your phone. Even if someone has stolen your password, they'll need more than that to access your account.

Building the technology and infrastructure to support this kind of feature has taken careful thought. We wanted to develop a security feature that would be easy to use and not get in your way. Along those lines, we're offering a variety of sign in options, along with the ability to indicate when you're using a computer you trust and don't want to be asked for a verification code from that machine in the future. Making this service available to millions of users at no cost took a great deal of coordination across Google’s specialized infrastructure, from building a scalable SMS and voice call system to developing open source mobile applications for your smart phone. The result is a feature we hope you'll find simple to manage and that makes it easy to better protect your account.

We look forward to gathering feedback about this feature and making it available to all of our users in the coming months.

If you'd like to learn more about about staying safe online, see our ongoing security blog series or visit http://www.staysafeonline.org/.

Stay safe while browsing

Posted by Panayiotis Mavrommatis and Niels Provos, Security Team

We are constantly working on detecting sites that are compromised or are deliberately set up to infect your machine while browsing the web. We provide warnings on our search results and to browsers such as Firefox and Chrome. A lot of the warnings take people by surprise — they can trigger on your favorite news site, a blog you read daily, or another site you would never consider to be involved in malicious activities.

In fact, it’s very important to heed these warnings because they show up for sites that are under attack. We are very confident with the results of our scanners that create these warnings, and we work with webmasters to show where attack code was injected. As soon as we think the site has been cleaned up, we lift the warning.

This week in particular, a lot of web users have become vulnerable. A number of live public exploits were attacking the latest versions of some very popular browser plug-ins. Our automated detection systems encounter these attacks every day, e.g. exploits against PDF (CVE-2010-2883), Quicktime (CVE-2010-1818) and Flash (CVE-2010-2884).

We found it interesting that we discovered the PDF exploit on the same page as a more “traditional” fake anti-virus page, in which users are prompted to install an executable file. So, even if you run into a fake anti-virus page and ignore it, we suggest you run a thorough anti-virus scan on your machine.

We and others have observed that once a vulnerability has been exploited and announced, it does not take long for it to be abused widely on the web. For example, the stack overflow vulnerability in PDF was announced on September 7th, 2010, and the Metasploit project made an exploit module available only one day later. Our systems found the vulnerability abused across multiple exploit sites on September 13th.

Here’s a few suggestions for protecting yourself against web attacks:

• Keep your OS, browser, and browser plugins up-to-date.
• Run anti-virus software, and keep this up-to-date, too.
• Disable or uninstall any software or browser plug-ins you don’t use — this reduces your vulnerability surface.
• If you receive a PDF attachment in Gmail, select “View” to view it in Gmail instead of downloading it.