Your branding and image online can quickly be eroded and damaged if your website is suddenly harbouring malicious code. Code like this could be inserted many ways, from an weakness in the code your website is running (SQL injection, XSS cross side scripting) or via a breech in your server. These types of site attacks can knock (no pun intended) your website out of the index and reduce your traffic and potential sales to zero.
Today I was doing a search for skiing ireland on google, when I noticed that one of the websites listed was flagged by google. The reason for the flagging ? The message from google was:
Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!
Here is a screenshot what google displayed for KnockAirport.com
Suggestions:* Return to the previous page and pick another result.
* Try another search to find what you’re looking for.Or you can continue to http://www.knockairport.com/news.asp?dbtype=news&id=51 at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.
For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.
If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google’s Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.
6.7.2008
In general, we also try to inform the webmaster of issues like that via email. Sometimes these kinds of hacks can be hard to recognize, so if this happens to your site and you can’t find it, it might be a good idea to go to the Google Webmaster Help groups and post there. Once the problem is fixed, you can file for a malware review in your Google Webmaster Tools account (at the URL you linked to
).
6.9.2008
Glad for your response John.
Looking at the website now it looks that some of the links have been removed, and that google is no longer giving a warning for the page. Looking at the code it seems that there is still an added JavaScript link to w ww.adw95.com but I don’t know if that is a good one or a bad one.
Paul
7.18.2008
[...] . But I was surprised to see again that there was one listing where google was saying that “This site may harm your computer” when you click on a link to IrishInterMarketing’s [...]