Google — Our Favorite Search Engine Becomes a Virus Scanner

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Using a little known capability of Google’s search engine, security vendor Websense has written tools that have found thousands of websites hosting hacking tools, as well as many legitimate sites that have been hacked. This capability is the binary search feature, in which Google can look inside the .exe files hosted on a site.

By taking advantage Google’s binary search capability, Websense has created new software tools that can sniff out malware using the popular search engine. Websense researchers Googled for strings that were used in known malware like the Bagel and Mytob worms and have uncovered about 2,000 malicious Web sites over the past month, according to Dan Hubbard, senior director of security and research with Websense. Source: PC World

We Say: Very cool. Nope, I didn’t know about this binary search capability. There are plans to share the tools with security researchers, but they don’t plan to make the code public … there is the chance (and I can see this), as the article says, that these tools could be used to search for malware to download and use rather than “buying them on the black market”.