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A little-known capability in Google's search engine has helped security vendor Websense uncover thousands of malicious websites as well as several legitimate sites that have been hacked, the company said on Friday. By taking advantage of Google's binary search capability, Websense has created new software tools that can sniff out malware using the popular search engine. Websense researchers Googled for strings that were used in known malware like the Bagel and Mytob worms and have uncovered about 2,000 malicious websites over the past month, according to Dan Hubbard, senior director of security and research with Websense. Though Google is widely used to search the internet, it can also peek through the binary information stored in the normally unreadable executable (.exe) files that are run by Windows computers. "They actually look inside the internals of an executable and index that information," Hubbard said. Hubbard and his team plans to share its Google code with a select group of security researchers, but it will not make the software public, for fear that the tool could be misused by the bad guys. Virus authors, for example, could use the Websense software to search for worms and viruses to use in their attacks, Hubbard said. "Instead of buying them on the black market (an attacker) could search for them and download them on his own."
