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Google Publishes Safe Browsing API
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-06-20
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Developers can connect to Google's blacklists of websites through the use of a newly launched API and use it to help protect application users.
 | | Google Publishes Safe Browsing API |  |
Google Desktop and Firefox use the blacklists maintained by Google to help keep people from visiting potentially dangerous websites. Those lists have been internal-only options, but that has changed.
Security researchers in Google's employ put out a warning to phishers and malware creators with the announcement of the new API. Developers can grab Google's lists of suspicious URLs through the API.
"The API is still experimental, but we hope it will be useful to ISPs, web-hosting companies, and anyone building a site or an application that publishes or transmits user-generated links," Google's researchers said on the Google Online Security blog.
The use of the API will allow developers to warn or block people from reaching the URLs retrieved from Google's blacklists. Their Safe Browsing API page said client applications would download an encrypted table of local, client-side lookups that can be used to check URLs before loading them.
Google continually updates its blacklists, a necessity since new domains and malware appear all too frequently. Users of the Firefox web browser have exposure to this API already, through Firefox's built-in phishing protection.
Tags: Google, Security, API
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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