Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Helping webmasters re-secure their sites

Webmaster Central Blog

Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

Helping webmasters re-secure their sites

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Google Security Blogover 10 million users encounter harmful websites'this site may harm your computer'hereInternational World Wide Web ConferenceHow many sites get compromised?

Number of freshly compromised sites Google detects every week.drive-by downloadsFinding the most effective ways to aid webmaster

Getting in touch with webmasters: One of the hardest steps on the road to recovery is first getting in contact with webmasters. We tried three notification channels: email, browser warnings, and search warnings. For webmasters who proactively registered their site with Search Console, we found that email communication led to 75% of webmasters re-securing their pages. When we didn’t know a webmaster’s email address, browser warnings and search warnings helped 54% and 43% of sites clean up respectively.

Providing tips on cleaning up harmful content: Attackers rely on hidden files, easy-to-miss redirects, and remote inclusions to serve scams and malware. This makes clean-up increasingly tricky. When we emailed webmasters, we included tips and samples of exactly which pages contained harmful content. This, combined with expedited notification, helped webmasters clean up 62% faster compared to no tips—usually within 3 days.

Making sure sites stay clean: Once a site is no longer serving harmful content, it’s important to make sure attackers don’t reassert control. We monitored recently cleaned websites and found 12% were compromised again in 30 days. This illustrates the challenge involved in identifying the root cause of a breach versus dealing with the side-effects.

Making security issues less painful for webmasters—and everyone
We hope that webmasters never have to deal with a security incident. If you are a webmaster, there are some quick steps you can take to reduce your risk. We’ve made it easier to receive security notifications through Google Analytics as well as through Search Console. Make sure to register for both services. Also, we have laid out helpful tips for updating your site’s software and adding additional authentication that will make your site safer.
If you’re a hosting provider or building a service that needs to notify victims of compromise, understand that the entire process is distressing for users. Establish a reliable communication channel before a security incident occurs, make sure to provide victims with clear recovery steps, and promptly reply to inquiries so the process feels helpful, not punitive.
As we work to make the web a safer place, we think it’s critical to empower webmasters and users to make good security decisions. It’s easy for the security community to be pessimistic about incident response being ‘too complex’ for victims, but as our findings demonstrate, even just starting a dialogue can significantly expedite recovery.Posted by Kurt Thomas and Yuan Niu, Spam & Abuse Research