A little-known capability in Google's search engine has helped security vendor Websense uncover thousands of malicious Web sites, as well as several legitimate sites that have been hacked, the company said today.
By taking advantage Google's binary search capability, Websense has created new software tools that can sniff out malware using the popular search engine. Websense researchers Googled for strings that were used in known malware like the Bagel and Mytob worms and have uncovered about 2,000 malicious Web sites over the past month, according to Dan Hubbard, senior director of security and research with Websense.
Though Google is widely used to search the Internet for Web pages and office documents, the search engine can also peek through the binary information stored in the normally unreadable executable (.exe) files that are run by Windows computers. "They actually look inside the internals of an executable and index that information," Hubbard said.
For Good Guys Only
Hubbard and his team plans to share its Google code with a select group of security researchers, but it will not make the software public, for fear that the tool could be misused by the bad guys.
Virus authors, for example, could use the Websense software to search for worms and viruses to use in their attacks, Hubbard said. "Instead of buying them on the black market (an attacker) could search for them and download them on his own."
Some bloggers have pointed out that hackers might also be able to manipulate the binary search feature to trick Google users into downloading malicious software.
Hackers could add common search terms into their malicious code in order to be included in search results, for example, which would then show up alongside legitimate Web sites.
