Badware Beware!

You may be seeing something new popping up on your screen as you are surfing the Net with Google.

It’s the new “Neighborhood Watch” program that resulted from partnership between search engine Goliath Google and the Stop Badware Coalition.

People who attempt to go to a Web site that has been identified as risky by the coalition are taken to a warning page.

"Warning – the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!" the message states. Then it offers users a link to "learn more about malware and how to protect yourself at StopBadware.org."

They suggest you return to the search page and choose a different result, or proceed to the website that is being flagged. . .but armed with the knowledge that you could be putting your computer at risk.

"We're not going to say don't do it," said John Palfrey, a professor at the Harvard Law School who teamed with Britain's Oxford University to provide much of the manpower for the coalition's Web-monitoring effort. "What we want to do is basically give people some more information about what might happen to their computer."

If you encounter a site that has malicious code, you can report the it to the Stop Badware Coalition. A human being then checks the report before the site is flagged.

Reported and flagged sites are not removed from search engines, but the idea is to warn users of potential problems.

I say kudos to Google and Stop Badware Coalition!

. . . Stephanie

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