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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