Bing offers malware site alerts

[Prorootect]

Microsoft offers Bing malware site alerts, warnings, with it's new re-evaluation tool - topic here ..

Microsoft offers Bing malware site re-evaluation tool : on cso.com.au : http://www.cso.com.au/article/460436/microsoft_offers_bing_malware_site_re-evaluation_tool/

.. Look at these screenshots I had made today:

BING malware site alert on the first link!.jpg

BING malware website alert!.jpg

Quote from the article:

By Liam Tung (CSO Online (Australia))— 30 April, 2013 09:44.

Web masters will now be able to ask Microsoft to re-evaluate sites labeled on its Bing search engine as malware threats, but if malware is found during the re-scan the warning could persist for a long time.

Web masters who have signed up to Bing’s Webmasters Tools can opt to receive an alert from Bing when the search engine has detected that malware is being hosted on the site.

Bing already scans the Web for infected Web pages and flags when a site, or its elements, pose a malware threat to users. Bing will present links to the dangerous page but places a caution next to the listing and disable clicking on the link.

The new re-evaluation process gives web masters a chance to have the malware alert removed, but web masters need to be certain no threats remain.

“If the malware is found during the review period, the re-evaluation will fail and you will not be able to submit another re-evaluation request for some time,” it notes without specifying the time between second re-evaluations.

Microsoft will provide Web masters with a list of “sample URLs” detected as containing harmful elements and a more detailed description of the threat than it previously offered, however, it will ultimately be up to the Web master to ensure Microsoft does not find malware during the re-evaluation process.

Microsoft will not provide information about vulnerabilities that could have allowed an exploit to appear on a website in the first place, and warns that these should be plugged before requesting a re-evaluation. If Microsoft is asked to review a malware site, it will perform “several deep re-scans” that go beyond the sample URLs provided.

Microsoft’s assessment includes any malware hosted on the website itself, as well as “malware references” found on a suspect page, such as a malicious iframe or a JavaScript that redirects visitors to a malicious page.

The reports will include details about seven types of issues, including: browser exploits, malicious JavaScript, malicious ActiveX, “heapspray” exploits against browsers, malware network references, malware found on adjacent pages and malware reported by external sources.

While Bing becomes more secure with this malware site alert feature, at the same time Google is becoming less secure with this 'experiment' to remove Instant Preview feature ..

CAREFUL!

Thank you BING developers!

 

[Prorootect]

While Bing becomes more secure with this malware site alert feature, at the same time Google is becoming less secure with this 'experiment' to remove Instant Preview feature ..

CAREFUL!

 

[Ink]

Is this the same Webmaster tool?

http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2013/04/26/geo-targeting-and-language.aspx

 

[Prorootect]

Yes, it's about this same malware warning alert feature, which is better described in this Bing blog article:
Safe Searching with Bing: A Response to AV-TEST's Search Malware Analysis : http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2013/04/19/safe-searching-with-bing-a-response-to-av-test-39-s-search-malware-analysis.aspx

We are free (with Bing) to take our personal decision:

'You may ask why we show these links at all if we think they are infected with malware? We don’t explicitly remove malicious sites from the index because most are legitimate sites that normally don’t host malware but have been hacked. Our research shows that if sites like this remain infected for a long period of time, their ranking will naturally fall because customers won’t click on them.

We warn our customers rather than suppressing the result for both completeness and educational reasons: first, if a user searches for “vacation hotline” and doesn’t get the site they’re looking for they perceive Bing to be an incomplete index of the web which impacts their confidence of the engine; second, if they can’t find the result on Bing (because we removed it completely from the results) and then they go to Google, search for it, find it, then click on it (because Google may not have detected it as malware) their machine could be put at risk. With Bing’s warning, they know “oh, okay, I should probably try again another time”.

Indeed as of this writing, if you search Google for “vacation hotline”, you will see the potentially infected result returned by Google and if you click on it, an attempt could be made to infect your machine. To help mitigate this scenario, we warn customers about potentially malicious links and our data shows that these warnings block 94% of clicks to malicious sites.'

'.. in the modern world of information sharing, it’s not enough to simply block everything outright, rather keeping customers informed and able to make the right decisions is key. .. we here at Bing are very confident that our methods for malicious link detection and warning make our engine one of the safest on the net.'

Bing treats us as intelligent and free men, thank you BING, bingo!

So Bing is 94% more secure than Google .. “oh, okay, I should probably try BING again another time”.

- Bing is my search engine by default (with its image of the day!), and for a long time ago ..