How To Tell If A Website is Malware Infected and Dangerous

If you are using Google Chrome, you already have this covered as it will put a warning sign on your screen telling you that “The site ahead contains malware”. The warnings protect you from harms caused by unsafe sites, such as malware infections and phishing attacks. But it hasn’t always been clear why a specific website triggers a warning, and you may want to learn more.

If you are interested in knowing the details, Google now has you covered too with the launch of a Site Status section in the Transparency Report.

If you own a website it’s a good idea checking the status of the website to see if it’s clean from Google’s perspective. You also no need to be panic if one of your own sites’ status shows “Dangerous”. As pointed out in a post on Google Online Security blog,

If a favorite website shows up as “dangerous,” it’s often due to user-uploaded bad content or a temporary malware infection. The Site Status will return to normal once the webmaster has cleaned up the website. To help speed up this process, we automatically give the webmaster a heads-up about the problem via Search Console; if you useGoogle Analytics, we’ll also warn you there if your site has malware on it. (Webmasters, check the help center to learn how to remove malware from your websites.)