The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports that the website of the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission has been tagged by Google Search and StopBadware.org as a ‘harmful’ site. When you try to go to this government’s agency website, you will be redirected to a warning page.
The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission is responsible for securities laws and regulating the securities industry. It is a state commission within the Philippine Department of Finance. Wikipedia
StopBadware.org is a “Neighborhood Watch” campaign aimed at fighting badware, seeking to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. A badware is a software that behaves in malicious and/or deceptive ways and is commonly referred to as spyware, malware, and deceptive adware. Downloading files containing badware may harm your computer.
It is odd how an agency which is responsible for securities laws could be accused of containing “unsecured” files. The SEC already wrote a letter to Google seeking explanation on how their website was tagged harmful.
People can still visit their website through directly typing their URL (http://www.sec.gov.ph/) to the address bar or through links from other website. The warning page only appears when the traffic come from Google search, that is if you click the SEC website using the search results.
What could have caused this warning?
1. Badware available for download on their site, especially in cases where it is bundled with the software or zipped files. In case of the SEC website, I only saw one zipped file which is a Microsoft Word Document entitled “Model Corporation - Manual on Corporate Governance”. I tried to download it but ZoneAlarm Anti-Virus did not detect any malware.
2. Badware available on sites that they link to. These are caused by direct linking to third-party sites that may contain badware.
3. Badware distributed through ads running on their site. So far, I don’t see any ads running on their website.
4. Hacking attacks to their site. I see this as a plausible reason for this incident.
Another common source of badware on websites is hacking attacks, which allow third parties to insert code or executables onto poorly secured websites. A common example is the “injection attack,” in which a hacker uses a security vulnerability to inject harmful code into one of your web pages. Usually this code will be invisible on your site to you and to any site visitors, but will trigger the download of badware in the background of a visitor’s computer. You can often detect whether this kind of attack has occurred by looking at the source code of your web pages and determining whether it contains any code that you did not place there. StopBadWare.org
Tags: Current Events, Google, In the News, Internet
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Jul 18, 2007 at 06:59:53
Well, it’s sad to see websites with a .gov suffix being tagged as spam. It’s sadder to see that the website is from here.