Not a day goes by when Google doesn’t de-list a website for some infraction or other, but today the search engine supremos have outdone themselves. As of today, none of the 11 million .co.cc domains will be featured in the Google results pages.
Apparently the .cc subdomain, operated by an independent Korean company, has been closed down after Google’s anti-malware scanner raised more than a few red flags.
It appears that over 50,000 separate malware domains were found from a single provider – which is more than enough to set any alarm bells ringing. And once Google took a look at the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s claims that over 4,963 phishing attacks had come from .cc domains in the second half of last year, they had no chance but to act swiftly.
Oliver Fisher of Google’s Anti-Malware team claimed that the move is a result of a recent upgrade to the company’s security systems:
“Google’s automated malware scanning systems detect sites that distribute malware. To help protect users we recently modified those systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain.”
It looks like the whole bulk domain must’ve been flagged, as none of the 11,383,746 .co.cc sites appear anywhere in Google’s listings.
Now if only they could ban spam emails from .cc domains too…
