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What are the tools Google uses to blacklist a website as being malicious (hosting a web malware)?
I know it is partly fed by users themselves who can enter unsafe URLs into Google's database.
But what, apart from this, are the tools Google uses? Does it rely on anti-viruses, for example?
Also, why is the Google safe browsing API not opensource?

user10008
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2 Answers2

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Google provides two experimental APIs for the Safe Browsing service

(1) Safe Browsing API v3

https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/developers_guide_v3

(2) Safe Browsing Lookup API

https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/lookup_guide

Both these above mentioned tools can be downloaded and used anytime .

https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/

For anyone who wants to know more about how Google's detection system works , a detailed tech report can be found here

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/provos-2008a.pdf

There is also this page where a user can easily query to check the site

http://grapethinking.com/google-safe-browsing-diagnostic

Google Chrome includes an optional feature called "Safe Browsing" to help protect users against phishing and malware attacks

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.html

  • The only link that answers to my question is the one that points to a PDF file. Thank you for it. –  Aug 19 '14 at 08:35
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@begueradj It's hard to say what technology Google is using for its safe browsing software but it would be a proprietary software made by engineers at Google. I suspect Google is scanning all the pages it indexes looking for malware code also Google owns VirusTotal which was hosted on the Google cloud from around 2007 (at that time it wasn't owned by Google) and it seems like safe browsing service was started around the same time. VirusTotal uses more then 50 antivirus engines to check for malware code and has one of the biggest malware databases.

After doing few days of research it seems like Google has made their own antivirus engine just like Mcrosoft has made their own engine.

Here is some info but not much http://www.cnet.com/news/googles-niels-provos-battles-malware-on-the-web/

Hope that helps.

BigBob1000
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