Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Fons Tuinstra Google wants me to prove I'm human in order to keep searching. Click to enlarge and see why.

Recently, security experts were in the middle of media hype when Google announced that surprisingly many sites and URLs can infect your computer with malicious code. (Here's the full research paper.)

How big is this problem? A summary of the research in Google's new security blog says: "Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 Web sites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1 percent. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. ...So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the Web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their Web servers have been compromised."

I'm starting to have some doubts about this assessment. In the past few days, Google has a new system in place that kicks you out of its search engine when it thinks your request resembles something that a virus or spyware might try. Yesterday this happened to me three times to me and I wasn't doing anything special.

You can get back on Google fast enough, by deciphering a hard-to-read "captcha" letter code to prove you're human. That works -- until the next time Google thinks I'm a virus.

Maybe I'm spoiled by the progress search engines make, but this is becoming a bit of a nuisance.

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