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Microsoft Employees Offer Protection From Google Results
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2006-07-12
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Some of the sites Google indexes will automatically redirect you to executable files. This can be convenient, if you're trying to download something like Firefox, as Claudiu Spulber was. But it might not be such a good thing if some sort of malware is on the other end of that link.
Spulber calls it "a security risk, even a high one . . . . Sites full of spyware might use this redirect bug to have spyware executables indexed and when the user will click it automatically installing all the malware in the world. I've tested this." Spulber writes of "a link from yaguo.com that is an executable file containing spyware," noting that "I've downloaded this specifially and monitored it, and it installs spyware."
"This is wrong and should be corrected," Spulber concludes. But as an article on Email Battles explains, that's not necessarily the case.
"Search engines can't simply ignore executables, because most of us need to find them now and again," the article reads (apologies to the author - his or her name did not appear to be mentioned). It goes on to suggest a couple of protective measures.
There is a mention of how "Michael Howard, a Senior Security Program Manager in Microsoft's Secure Engineering group, whipped up DropMyRights, his freebie utility." Aaron Margosis, also of Microsoft, "ginned up" another tool, called MakeMeAdmin.
Margosis writes, "When you run it, you get a Command Prompt running under your normal user account, but in a new logon session in which it is a member of the Administrators group. This Command Prompt and any programs started from it use your regular profile, authenticate as you on the network, but have full local admin privileges. All other programs continue to run with your regular, unprivileged account."
If the way in which Google (and other search engines) can link to executable files makes you uneasy, the tools are worthing checking out.
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About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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