OREANDA-NEWS. May 28, 2009. Yandex notifies its users of infected webpages to protect their computers from malicious content.

Yandex monitors the indexed webpages for potentially malicious codes and marks the infected webpages in Yandex search results in order to notify its users of unsafe content. Yandex just notifies users of possible consequences and does not block the access to the webpage completely.

To detect malicious content Yandex uses a checkup solution that integrates Sophos’s SAV Interface™ technology.

Although the percentage of dangerous websites in the Runet is small, any web resource, even a reputed one, may get infected. It may not be necessarily the owner’s fault, the website may become infected after being hacked. In order to get recommendations on how to deal with the detected malicious webpage the owner may visit the Yandex.Webmaster service to see the malicious content status and get detailed instructions.

“We notify the website owner of detected malicious content via our Yandex.Webmaster service,” says Olga Smagina, Project Manager. “The malicious markup will be removed from the detected webpage in Yandex search results as soon as the webpage is proved to be safe. The owner may find the malicious code himself and report on its deletion to speed up the markup removal.”

See the Webmaster’s blog (in Russian) for more information from Yandex search team on how websites in the Runet get infected.