False Accusations

Yesterday I received an email from a blogging friend that said someone had reported my cooking blog as containing malware over on the CMF forums.  I of course felt that horrible feeling of panic!  I know for a fact that none of the HTML has been edited in well over a week so there has been no new widgets added.  The suspected malware was rpc.blogrolling.com but I don't use them.  I checked all the widgets on my blog and could not see a problem.  By then I was really starting to panic so I went over to Blogger help forums to do a bit of digging.  I found that bloglinker.com is malware but I don't have that either.  In fact compared to many bloggers I don't have a lot of widgets and those I do have are from well trusted sources.  In Blogger help I found the link to Google's Safe Browsing Diagnostics so typed in my cooking blog url.  Here's a link to the full report:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=momskitchencooking.blogspot.com

My blog is not considered suspicious and has had no malware detected in the past 90 days.  The last time Google checked my blog was September 23, 2010 (yesterday).  So despite the report it did not appear there is any basis for it.  The blogger who issued the malware alert was browsing with Chrome and a second user reported Chrome flagged my blog as containing malware yet Firefox did not.  I checked it with Safari (5.0.2) and Internet Explorer (8) with AVG not flagging any malware.  To be on the safe side I ran a full computer scan using AVG that showed no malware.  So my blog is clean of malware and always has been.    A quick Google search shows that Chrome has had a history of false malware reports though.

However, thanks to another blogging friend I found that the problem seemed to be the malware detection algorithm in Chrome that was flagging my blog due to a link in the Key Ingredients Blogroll that pointed to their host Blogrolling.  Blogrolling hosted many blogrolls and are aware of the problem but won't be fixing it because according to one report (Sep 17, 2010) they are closing up.   Their recommendation is to remove any blogroll widget that was hosted on their system.  Anyone using a blogroll that was hosted through Blogrolling is going to have this problem.  So either way the widget would have become a problem.  Essentially Chrome was picking up that my blog linked to a blogroll that in turn linked to Blogrolling.  My blog was never the problem in the first place. I should also point out that the particular widget in question has been on my blog for a good couple of years if not longer and Chrome certainly had no problem with it up until apparently yesterday.

In this particular case it would have been nice if the blogger who issued the malware alert had contacted me first before jumping the gun and dragging my blog through the mud so to speak.  Browser detection services can and do fail.  In this case there is absolutely nothing wrong with my blog it is from the browser being used to view the blog  picking up an external link from another external link.  A simple check of my blog with another browser would have shown there was no malware AND the person could always have ran my blog url through Google's Safe Browsing Diagnostics just as I did to see my blog did not contain malware.  I think it was irresponsible and drama seeking to issue a public malware alert when in fact there never was any threat of malware on my cooking blog nor has there ever been a threat for malware on it.

Garden Gnome
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