Google has temporarily flagged up the London Stock Exchange's website as a malware danger, due to a third-party advertiser on that site hosting malicious software.
Google has temporarily flagged up the London Stock Exchange's website as a malware danger. Photo credit: jam_90s on Flickr
The issue came up on Sunday, a spokesperson for the London Stock Exchange (LSE) told ZDNet UK. "We were previously carrying an advert from a third-party provider," a spokesperson said on Monday. "That advert, if you clicked through to the third-party website, had a flag up as being a virus or something similar. We've obviously taken the advert down off our website."
According to Google's Safe Browsing diagnostic page, a visit to a page on the LSE site on Saturday resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The malware was hosted on a site called stripli.com, while two others — unanimis.co.uk and borsaitaliana.it — appeared to be "functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site", Google said.
Google stressed that the LSE site was not itself hosting malware. It also noted that the stripli.com-hosted malware had also caused similar problems with other sites, including reviewcentre.com and viamichelin.com.
The LSE spokesperson said the bourse had spoken to Google on Sunday and was told that "they'll be taking that flag down as soon as possible".
The last month has presented the LSE with multiple technical mishaps. The exchange's migration to a new Linux platform caused problems for brokers in mid-February, and a week later a more serious glitch caused all trading to be put on hold for hours. In November, another LSE trading platform went down for two hours.
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Talkback
This news reinforces how important it is for organisations to protect their online presence. Whilst the LSE is not directly to blame for the malware, the association with this will not help recent negative press about technology faults http://bit.ly/hXfIcW. Customer trust is vital, and providing a stable business platform is key to success.
But google has sold the same malware spreading advertisments on its own site and is not flagging malware sites in its searches.
Just load WOT on your browser to see all the malware google is spreading through its search results.
If they are trully acting as good guys here why do they allow the same practice on there own servers and advertisements? Both 1st hand and second hand malware can be found this way. both in your searches and in googles advertisements on the side that they make a profit from.
SO GOOGLE IS PROFITING FROM SPREADING MALWARE.
So if their site hosts links to malware they have no fault at all?
What does this say about law and justice on the internet?