Google moves to block malware vending subdomains

Internet giant Google has moved to block subdomain providers from serving thousands of web pages that provide a distribution outlet for malware.

Announcing a move to automatically identify and block bulk subdomain providers from Google’s search engine, Google said that the firm’s malware scanners had found more than 50,000 malware domains from one such bulk provider.

"Google’s automated malware scanning systems detect sites that distribute malware. To help protect users we recently modified those systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain," said Oliver Fisher of Google Anti-Malware Team.

Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, had earlier posted on the new Google+ social network service: "If we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality, we do reserve the right to take action on the freehost as a whole."

Cutt’s identified ‘freehosts’ as organisations which "will let anyone register a site on that domain," adding that there were lots of high-quality services such as wordpress.com.

However less scrupulous operators such as .co.cc, which allows bulk registration of thousands of domains – almost exclusively used for search engine manipulation and malware, would now find themselves blocked wholesale from Google’s ubiquitous search engine.

Over 10 million websites on the .co.cc domain have now been entirely removed from Google’s search results. We don’t expect there will be too many tears shed.