Google 5th Worldwide Most Infected Web Sites

In a report by StopBadware.org, U.S. based Google is ranked 5th in hosting sites which are infected “badware” or attempts to deliver what we commonly called Malware. The top four sites on the list are all based in China.

After analyzing 200,000 sites, the report found 4,261 infected sites hosted by Google which may be small compared to the 48,834 infected sites found on #1 Chinanet-Backbone.

The majority of the problems I’ve seen have been on Google based newsgroups and their blogspot Blog hosting service. Google has made creating a Blogspot account so easy that it’s easily abused. Due to spam filters I was forced to create a BitsFromBill.com domain to use in my Email signature. This address just redirects users to this page but when I included billpstudios.blogspot.com in my Emails’ many spam filters blocked me. Ironically, I first disovered this when an Email to a friend at StopBadware.org bounced back.

Now here’s the twist. Google.com is a major sponsor and a one of the founding sponsors of StopBadware.org. I give them a lot of credit for helping to make this report available. Google has made an effort to take down malware sites as quickly as they can but it’s daunting task. Obviously, they still need to re-evaluate some of their procedures.

RealPlayer with Rhapsody is BADWARE

The folks at StopBadware.org have been busy looking at all kinds of software and this week designated the RealPlayer as “Badware”.

“We find that RealPlayer 10.5 is badware because it fails to accurately and completely disclose the fact that it installs advertising software on the user's computer. We additionally find that RealPlayer 11 is badware because it does not disclose the fact that it installs Rhapsody Player Engine software, and fails to remove this software when RealPlayer is uninstalled. “

“We currently recommend that users do not install the versions of RealPlayer software that we tested, unless the user is comfortable with the software behaviors we identify or until the application is updated to be consistent with the recommendations contained in this report. “

I’m not a big fan of RealPlayer even though I was hoping they’d provide some competition for Microsoft’s Media Player. Unfortunately, RealNetworks have always promoted some annoying habits. One of the reasons I created the “Disable” feature in WinPatrol was programs like RealPlayer that keep coming back as an autostart programs. All you have to do is view a video or listen to music in RealPlayer and they think it means you want RealPlayer to run every time you reboot. They’re not unique. Apple does the same thing with Quicktime.

I was surprised by this announcement. I'm told typically Stopbadware.org only gives companies 24 hour notice before an announcement so perhaps we'll see new versions from RealNetworks soon.