Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool

Niels Provos mentioned it at today’s Web 2.0 Security and Privacy workshop, and somehow everyone I knew missed Google’s official announcement last week of the safe browsing diagnostic page.

So what type of information is given back to the user?

1. What is the current listing status for
   [the site in question]?
   We display the current listing status of a site and also information on how often a site or parts of it were listed in the past.
2. What happened when Google visited this site?
   This section includes information on when we analyzed the page, when it was last malicious, what kind of malware we encountered and so fourth.   To help web masters clean up their site, we also provide information about the sites that were serving malicious software to users and which sites might have served as intermediaries.
3. Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
   Here we provide information if this site has facilitated the distribution of malicious software in the past. This could be an advertising network or statistics site that accidentally participated in the distribution of malicious software.
4. Has this site hosted malware?
   Here we provide information if the the site has hosted malicious software in the past. We also provide information on the victim sites that initiated the distribution of malicious software.

This is a very useful tool to quickly identify if there is known malware on a site. Thanks to Niels and his team at Google for bringing this tool online for the community to use.