Third Party Gadgets And Recent Malware Detected Blogs

Earlier this week, we noted an increased level of activity in reports about blogs locked as suspected spam hosts, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken. Upon review of the increased volume of spam referrals, with the majority of the cases found to be spurious, Blogger Support provided advice, about a new reason for deleted blogs.

Yesterday, our malware detection system began receiving reports of malicious content on some blogs. While the blog content on many of these blog may be malware-free, 3rd party widgets on these blogs may contain malware.

When a blog is locked for hosting malicious third party gadgets, the blog will be present in the dashboard "Deleted blogs" list - and should be unlocked, on the spot, using the "Restore" option in the list.

The Known Issues advice continues, and describes a planned action.

We’re currently in the process of contacting all blog owners with instructions.

Until Blogger Engineering comes up with an automated contact procedure, owners of blogs which are deleted by Blogger may do well to check their dashboard "Deleted blogs" list, before asking for spam review in the forums.

Owners who find their blog listed, in "Deleted blogs" will be able to immediately restore the blog in question. Having restored the blog, it will be accessible in the "Locked blogs" list - where only the administrators can access it - and remove any possibly malicious third party gadgets, which may have been recently installed. So far, we've seen problems reported with

• Email address collection.
• Third party advertising.
• Traffic redirection
.

All of these are known to trigger malware classification, and cause locked blogs. While the blog is in "Locked blogs", it will remain offline, and inaccessible by readers and search engines.

Once all malicious / unsafe accessories and tweaks have been removed, the owner can submit the blog for unlock review, using the "Request Unlock Review" button in "Locked Blogs". Given a successful review, the blog will be returned to the main "My blogs" list, and restored to service.

Once malicious accessories and tweaks have been removed from the blog in question, it's a good idea to not reinstall them. Repeated detection will lead to Blogger account termination, similar to the penalty for repeated DMCA violations.

There are several reasons why all owners of such blogs may not see their blog listed, in a dashboard list. Owners of these blogs will still be obligated to report their problem in the forums - and to patiently wait while Blogger Support can restore their blogs.

The latter scenario will provide one more example while poorly planned anonymous blog ownership is not a good idea.

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Adding AdBrite Ads To Your Blog May Cause Spurious Spam Classification

For several months, we've been seeing reports from various Blogger blog owners, about yet another possible source of spurious spam classification.

I just received the email:

Hello,

Your blog at http://yourblog.blogspot.com/ has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service for: MALICIOUS_JAVASCRIPT. In accordance to these terms, we've removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible. For more information, please review the following resources:

Blogger Terms of Service: http://blogger.com/terms.g
Blogger Content Policy: http://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy

-The Blogger Team

This happened almost immediately after I added HTML script recommended to me from AdBrite.

Use of the dashboard review request will generally repeat the originally offered verdict.

MALICIOUS_JAVASCRIPT.

In most cases, final review, when properly requested in the forum, will finally result in the blog being restored.

Review of various discussions in Webmaster Central indicate that AdBrite is not well regarded, in anti malware circles. One helper there suggested that AdBrite has a problem with security, allowing spammers to publish into their service - which puts unacceptable content on the blogs showing their ads.

If you want to publish a Blogger blog which does not get periodically locked as a suspected spam host, you might want to consider using a different ad hosting service - and to remove any similar third party gadgets from your blog.

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