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Google Blocks MacMall.com |
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Written by Chris Tangora
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Wednesday, 16 July 2008 |
 In a surprising move, Google has blocked direct access to some of the MacMall.com website from Google's search pages. When doing a Google search of "Mac Accessories" MacMall is the first site that comes up, but there is an interesting warning under it's listing, "This site may harm your computer" . At first I thought it was a joke, kind of like voiding the warrranty as you mod your rig. I opened it along with a dozen other links in my tabs. When I got around to the MacMall tab I was surprised to see that it was serious, and how serious Google is about your safety.
Apparently Google checks the the sites fairly frequently and will place this warning on sites that have links to or will install malicious code, see Google's FAQ for more info on this. Of the 27 pages of MacMall's accessories tested, two script exploits were found over the past 90 days resulting in 3 new processes started on a target machine. Since we have not heard of any Mac exploits, I would think that these are PC specific exploits. The exploits were not hosted on MacMall.com, but were on pages linked via macmall.com. If you are on a PC or are not blocking scripts, I would stay clear of MacMall until this issue is cleared up. If you are using FireFox, you can use NoScript to block all scripts you don't want run. If you haven't tried it yet, give it a look.
I really like the fact that Google is checking these things, and will personally be using Google a bit more because of this extra level of security.
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