Google Now Warns You Before You Visit Sites That Contain Harmful Downloads

Google has upgraded their security checks to not just warn you before you download harmful programs to your computer but also to warn you before you visit a site that has these downloads.

Within Google search, before you click to a web site that has such harmful downloads available on it, Google will warn you to stay away from the site. Google has warned users before they visit sites with malware, that are hacked or have other exploits but this is the first time Google is warning about sites with harmful downloads.

Google applied this not just to the organic search results but also to the AdWords listings and Chrome browser.

Google said:

In addition to showing warnings before you download unwanted software, Chrome will show you a new warning, like the one below, before you visit a site that encourages downloads of unwanted software.

Google Search now incorporates signals that identify such deceptive sites. This change reduces the chances you’ll visit these sites via our search results.

Ads: We recently began to disable Google ads that lead to sites with unwanted software.

Google has told me that this is unrelated to the hack mis-classifier from last week.