How to Remove Reported Attack Site Warning on Google
Written by Pavan Kumar on June 11, 2009
Yesterday one of my friends’ site was marked by Google to spread malwares and it was blocked by firefox. When I tried to enter the site, I was presented with a message which informed clearly that the website has been reported as an attack site and been blocked due to security reasons.
This was the message provided:
Reported Attack Site
This web site at ****.com has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.
Attack sites try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damange your system.
Some attack sites intentionally distribute harmful software, but many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners.
There were buttons to move out of the risk, or to know the reason why it has been blocked and the other one(small – at footer) to ignore this message and continue browsing.
Why are sites filtered?
There are two reasons for this: Phishing and Malware.
Phishing is something you come across rarely, but its very dangerous for careless / newbie users. Its some web page created (mostly on free platform) to steal personal informations / financial informations. Such pages usually imitate pages of Paypal or popular banks where financial transactions are involved. Those pages look exactly like the original websites, but once you enter your login credentials, they will be logged into their system and will be further used for the benefit of phishers. Till now, I have come across one such phishing page (that was brand new, not filtered by google at the time I visited) for blogger/blogspot. He used to spread the links saying blogger has decided to give away domains for users and users need to log in through the particular webpage he linked. I could easily identify that and reported the web forgery to Google.
If you ever come across such sites, please report them. Here is the procedure to report web forgery / spam sites.
Malware is what you all know and have experienced. They are tiny softwares which install on your computer to steal your informations or take any advantages otherwise. Hope you all remember Google Tips – from Antivirus 2009 – a rogue software which even infected web servers all over. Some websites do spread such malwares and hence it is not wise to visit such sites. And this is the reason those websites are blocked.
Who is responsibe for these?
Well, physhing – its definitely the owner (not domain owner in case of free sites). But malwares – owners are not always responsible for such acts, but in few cases, owners do. You all install different javascripts / ad codes – there are some ad networks which spread viruses / malwares on these ad codes. And when Google comes across such sites, they will block access on firefox. Thanks for the collaboration of Google and Firefox – users are safe. I myself have had a bitter experience when installing an ad code on a blogspot blog made Google to delete my entire blog and even I could not retreive it.
What Google will do?
Google knows it, owner is not always held responsible – they send warning mails to users at these ids: abuse@, admin@, administrator@, contact@, info@, postmaster@, support@, webmaster@domain.com. So, please be sure to have mails setup for these generic domains. Its even a wise idea to setup catch all email ids. They also popup an alert message on Webmaster Tools. And at the user end, Google try to block user from accessing it – to safeguard the users.
(Note: This image was taken when a Google bug reported "This site may harm yoru computer" to all sites on Google black day)
How to get rid of that?
First, on the firefox alert page, click on Why was this site blocked? button. You will be directed to a page which contains required information to identify the source of error which made Google to block your website, now you will be / "somehow you should" fix it.
Now, goto webmaster tools, they will popup message Parts of this site may be distributing malware – click on more details. And there you can request a review of your website providing all details about the problem and how you solved it. They will review your website soon and if your site is clear of all malware links / suspecious codes, your site will be back to normal soon.
Result:
In my friend’s case, I saw hundreds of human visits from Google IP and everything was reinstated within one day(not sure about exact hours, but for sure – not more than one day).
More information on this can be found on Google Webmaster Help. If you run a wordpress blog, here is a nice solution to secure wordpress blog.
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I have fixed, but i didnt have webmaster tool at google. How do I report this problem?
Thanks