A Google malware researcher gave a rare peek inside the company's massive anti-malware and anti-phishing efforts at the SecTor conference here, and the data that the company has gathered shows that the attackers who make it their business to infect sites and exploit users are adapting their tactics very quickly and creatively to combat the efforts of Google and others.
While Google is still a relative newcomer to the public security scene, the company has deployed a number of services and technologies recently that are designed to identify phishing sites as well as sites serving malware and prevent users from finding them. The tools include the Google SafeBrowsing API and a handful of services that are available to help site owners and network administrators find and eliminate malware and the attendant bugs from their sites.
All of these are related to Google's constant crawling of the Web, which, among many other things, allows the company to identify malware-distribution sites as well as legitimate sites that have been compromised with injected malicious code. Attackers have taken to infecting legitimate sites for a number of reasons, one of which is that those sites will show up more prominently in Google search results.
