Posted on Sunday, July 09 2006 @ 0:06 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
PC World reports a little-known capability in Google's search engine has helped security firm Websense to uncover thousands of malicious websites, as well as several legitimate websites that have been hacked.
By taking advantage Google's binary search capability, Websense has created new software tools that can sniff out malware using the popular search engine. Websense researchers Googled for strings that were used in known malware like the Bagel and Mytob worms and have uncovered about 2,000 malicious Web sites over the past month, according to Dan Hubbard, senior director of security and research with Websense.
Though Google is widely used to search the Internet for Web pages and office documents, the search engine can also peek through the binary information stored in the normally unreadable executable (.exe) files that are run by Windows computers. "They actually look inside the internals of an executable and index that information," Hubbard said.
Read more over here.
