Blogspot.com cited as the No. 1 host for malware from News.com reports Google’s Blogger accounts “for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts.” Sophos, an antivirus vendor, published a report showing the state of malware injections and attacks throughout the web.

Specifically, hackers can set up “malicious blogs” on the Blogger service, plus they can inject dangerous web links and content into Blogger blogs.

The Google web search team takes malware attacks seriously. They have reviews in webmaster tools and they label malicious web sites in web search results. So isn’t it ironic that Google hosts the number one problem of malware on the Internet?

Yesterday, I said that we had reports of spam on Google Sites, as well as spam on Google Groups. But this report shows that Google’s Blogger is worse than both of those.

A Google spokesperson gave News.com a statement:

Google takes the security of our users very seriously, and we work hard to protect them from malware. Using Blogger, or any Google product, to serve or host malware is a violation of our product policies. We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our network.

My day started reading about how Google was reportedly censoring anti-Barack Obama blogs by shutting them down on Google-owned Blogger. I quickly did some debunking in a comment on our Sphinn site — but still, Google probably needs to do more to ensure its Blogger spam reporting tools aren’t being abused — especially given how it says these "can’t be manipulated by angry mobs." Right now, it looks like they can.

NewsBusters has the best write-up of the charges I’ve seen, covering how a number of anti-Obama blogs received emails recently from Google saying they were unable to publish until after an investigation had been done to see if they were spam blogs. One of the emails sent said:

Dear Blogger user,

This is a message from the Blogger team.

Your blog, at http://comealongway.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog. You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

Note that the message doesn’t say anything like "You’re anti-Obama — so you’re banned." So those claiming Google censorship on that issue have some nice catchy headlines but no smoking gun.

Still, it is unusual that seven different sites on the anti-Obama topic apparently were frozen, blogs that are apparently part of the Just Say No Deal coalition. I thought — as Newsbusters does — that the more likely culprit would be pro-Obama people misusing the spam reporting tool at Blogger.

You’ll see this tool at the top of Blogger-hosted blogs such as this one. There’s a "Flag Blog" button that, if you click on it, turns red and sends a notice to Google.

This leads to Google’s help pages about it. They say:

The Flag button isn’t censorship and it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.

Well, unless Google is indeed censoring itself, it does look like that button has been manipulated. Real conspiracy people might even think the blogs themselves used it to get themselves banned and attract attention, though I think that’s pretty far fetched. But certainly it seems someone has.

And the search connection? As Nathania Johnson at Search Engine Watch notes, Google encourages public reporting of web spam. If they’re getting it wrong on Blogger, why wouldn’t they get it wrong in web search?

In part, Google has more signals to help keep it straight on the web search side — a quality site with a good history getting a sudden influx of reports, that wouldn’t seem right. Plus, you’ve got different teams looking into different spam reports. Just because Blogger’s spam tool might be messed up doesn’t mean the web search tools are. But still, a valid point to raise.

Postscript: Statement from Google now in:

We think blog spam is a serious problem and we have spam detection software to try to eliminate it. In this case, it appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts. While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the “Just Say No Deal” network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.

Interesting. This means it wasn’t the flag tool to blame but instead likely that Gmail’s spam detection feature that kicked in and caused it.

Postscript 2: I asked for more info on how the email detection works [based solely on Gmail monitoring? Reports from other providers?], but Google simply responded, “We prefer not to go into too much detail so as to maintain the integrity of our spam-fighting efforts, but suffice to say that our anti-spam filters incorporate signals from a variety of sources.” Also, the New York Times has a story up now here and more coverage via Techmeme here.

Google Custom Search Blog Hacked? from Google Blogoscoped quickly reported what appeared to be a hack of Google’s official Custom Search Blog. But what really happened was that Google marked their own blog as a spam blog and ultimately removed the blog from Blogger, allowing someone else to claim the URL.

Google sent Google Blogoscoped a response detailing the issue:

Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn’t happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

PC World has more details explaining that the notification sent to the bloggers at the Custom Search Blog was “overlooked” and after a period of time, the Custom Search Blog was deleted.

Soon after the blog was removed, it appeared that the blog was then hacked. But Google quickly restored the blog to the rightful owners, themselves.

Google Security: Google Mac Blog Hacked & Google Calendar Users Not Being Safe covers other hacking and oddities that have hit official Google blogs.

Google axes death-threat blog at The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Google finally shut down CYFSWATCH New Zealand blog after numerous complaints from governmental officials in New Zealand. The blog, hosted on Google’s Blogger service, reportedly wrote a death threat against a New Zealand politician.

When you access the blog at this time, it says “NONE” and that is followed with “No posts match your query.” But the Google Cache still shows blog posts from the blog, at this point in time. More details at The Sydney Morning Herald.

Last month, I wrote Public Spam/Splog Report over on my personal blog, begging Google to stop the "people search" spam that’s been clogging my Google Blog Search feeds with junk off Google’s own Blogger service. Today, I noticed Steve Rubel writing recently on the same issue.

Steve gives you the screenshots of how the junk shows up on Google Blog Search. My post goes into depth on the redirection and scraping that’s going on. End of story, the junk needs to step. C’mon, Google — fix it.

FYI, here’s today’s latest junk out of my newsreader from just today:

• United States People Search Engine
• Google People Search In Nc
• Google Canada People Search
• Germany People Search Engine
• Map Google People Search Engine
• People Search Hotmail Uk
• People Search Engines Germany
• Search Engine For People ’s Contact Via Email
• Search Yahoo Com/search P Old People Porn
• Google Usa People Search 20
• Katrina Google People Search
• Yahoo People Search 20
• People Search Engines Germany
• Google’s Blogger Hit By Huge Influx of Redirect Spam

Kill it!

Now that Blogger is officially out with a new version, I guess Google’s ready to get behind the service in a big way. The screenshot above shows a new promotional "tip" I just got in my web search results. I’ve never seen anything like that before for Blogger nor that I can recall for any other Google products. Not like this. The tip reads:

Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger

It seems to be triggered by any use of the word "blog" in a search. For me, all of these will make it come up:

• blog
• blogger
• blogs suck
• blog about google closing its soap api

By making this a tip rather than promoting Blogger in ad units, Google avoids the entire debate of whether it pays for its ads fairly or not (it recently said it does; last year after similar reassurances, I still found I had a ton of questions I may yet follow up on for answers).

Personally, I’ve got no problem with the tip. As I’ve written, I want Google to do promos like this outside of the ad units, so advertisers aren’t

to lose a spot to Google itself.

Don’t forget, Blogger does sounds like it has some pretty handy new features. Find the rundown on the official Blogger blog here.

Postscript: Google Blogoscoped notes Google Calendar has been promoted this way before.