FireFox's warning page
The review process is broke and we want our websites back.
Seems Google is no better than the hackers who go from website to website adding their iframes to your pages in order perform their dirty deeds.
I was contacted last week to clean one such site that fell victim to one of these iframe injection attacks. And as expected, I found this site had one of those scary “Reported Attack Site” warning pages blocking entry to the infected website.
This was a rather simple HTML built website. No fancy scripts or CMS software running that we could blame which left us wondering how the hacker was able to gain entry to alter the web pages. I did some researching which brought up two possibilities. The first was that their webhost recently admitted to having “a problem due to security issues with the used server software at that time.” I changed all the account passwords since their was a good chance the hacker had a list of everyone’s logins. This also explains the high percentage of affected sites on that particular server.
The second was the possibility the hacker exploited an old CGI page used by the site’s off-site billing system. I found this was no longer necessary and quickly tossed it out. I then removed all those nasty links from each page and deleted a few other pages that were no longer needed.
Well now I am confident that this site is safe and ready for business again. It was time to request a review from Google… but wait a minute. You have to sign up to their own service to do so. This fact along with everything else now pointing to services controlled by and ran by Google has site owners and webmasters in a rage.
There are comments posted all over the web exclaiming things such as, “What gives you the right to” and “Who made you the Internet Police?”
In their defense, posts by Google employees and supporters basically state that they can do whatever they wish with their website and are obligated to protect their users from harm’s way. I could understand this position much better except for the facts that are now staring me right in the face.
This site is not just being blocked by Google, but by other major players such as FireFox, who is blindly using the data supplied by Google to place a block on a website.
Google also claims that a user has a choice and can decide whether they want to continue browsing to your website or not. But the page they are presented with now has that user frightened to enter the site with that big red warning in front of them. The page also does not include anything to allow a user to continue to their intended destination. Plus, four out of the five links on this page go directly to Google, while the other goes to StopBadware.org through (what else) a Google.com link.
And despite what that page says, you will just end up with another nasty warning page by entering the URL directly in your FireFox browser. Why? Because Google says so.
Let’s compare all that for a minute with a real life situation. Your house has been robbed and you called the police. Does the officer take you into custody, lock up your home, and send you to the judge saying that you could be dangerous ? No, it does not work that way does it ? We find the criminal and lock them up. We also do what we can to assist the victim.
Its now gone five days since I requested a review but the site is still being blocked. The only clue to be found is the useless “Safe Browsing” page they give us which only tells me, “Site is listed as suspicious.” No other information is given that could actually be used to clear up any remaining problems — that is IF any still exist.
So why all the secrecy? What are we hiding from ? The hacker ? I am sure they already know and are taken advantage of this situation. It has been awhile since this system has been in place and the results are in. The amount of hacked websites keep increasing while the innocent webmasters go out of business.
This system is about effective as spraying water on a grease fire.
Meanwhile, this hacker is still on the loose infecting thousands more websites and this site is now being hijacked by Google.
