Search giant Google has announced that is closing a loophole in its Safe Browsing policies, in order to flag websites that constantly spread unwanted software, malware, and any other damaging content as "repeat offenders". This represents a huge setback for this kind of sites since it has been known that it can´t appeal the warnings for a month.
Websites That Post Harmful Content Are Considered Repeat Offenders
The company noted that the websites that would be subject to the policy and classified as repeat offenders are exclusively those that purposefully post damaging content, instead of the pages that have been hacked. This creates an important release for many of these sites, considering that many of it feared that this situation was included in the reasons of being flagged.
The strategist on Google´s Safe Browsing team, Brooke Heinichen, posted on his blog two days ago, that these new actions have been taking place since many sites ended up founding a way work around Google´s policies, to the point where many of it keep doing its illegal activities when Google removed the warnings.
This Might Be Ineffective Against Email Phishing Attacks
According to the International Business Times, when a site is considered a Repeat Offender by Google´s Safe Browsing, the webmaster will be notified, without getting the right to request a review for a month. After that period, the website administrator might request the search giant for a review.
Although the Google´s Safe Search represents an important effort of the company to stop websites from spreading malware and much other harmful content, it is not known how effective it would be to make users safer. In fact, Engadget reported that it might be ineffective to stop the damage that represents email phishing attacks, which have caused many of the biggest breaches on the internet.
This included the situation about Hilary Clinton´s campaign chairman, John Podesta, whose email was victim of this kind of cyber attack, and many classified documents were stolen from him and published on the social media by the transparency radical organization Wikileaks, which ended up being extremely damaging for the Democratic candidate, as reported in a previous article.
