Jul 13, 2006

Google indexing .exe files - part 2

Well in my original blog post (Google indexing executable files) I omitted to put a proof on how I got to see exe files indexed in Google. Thing is that I'm subscribed to Google Alerts (a service from Google that allows you to receive email notifications when relevant Google results from web + news are found based on a query or topic) for the term Backup4all. So everytime Google finds it in the web results or news, it send an email. This is how I received the following email alert, saying that the mentioned website contained the search term Backup4all:





As you can see it is an executable file hosted on a crack site. Later I downloaded that file and installed it on a "doomed" computer (as it turned out the file contained some Chinese trojans). Now, as others have mentioned this shouldn't be a risk for people that know what they're doing, but let's not forget that there are others not so computer literate that would trust anything coming from Google (of course there is the possibility that they already have a form of spyware installed, judging from statistics that say 80% of computers have some form of spyware).

Of course for every bad part there is a good one too. Websense developed an application that uses the Google API to find viruses and other infected exe files indexed. Now it remains the problem of shutting those websites down.

An interesting thing is that now the search for "Signature: 00004550" yields about half the number of results it did 3 weeks ago. Plus that result with the crack site I found it's nowhere to be found now, so they must have worked on removing some of these files.