As huge corporations go, Google's a pretty cuddly one, but according to the search giant itself, everyone should be careful about offers of employment or wealth that involve its name. "Google Money" scammers represent a growing problem that the company is trying to combat.

Google Goes After Impersonator Scammers
A post on the Official Google Blog announced today, "[D]espite hundreds of consumer complaints and our own efforts to keep these sites from tricking people, some scams continue. To fight back, we're working to stop various fraudulent 'Google Money' schemes, and this week filed suit against Pacific WebWorks and several other unnamed defendants."

The post then added, "[W]e're still working constantly to remove scammy URLs from our index, and we'll permanently disable AdWords accounts that provide a poor or harmful user experience, whether or not they use Google's trademarks illegally."

The problem continues to exist, though.

So fair warning: The scams are known to operate under names like the Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, Google StartUp Kit, Google Works, and the Home Business Kit for Google. From there, they tend to be fairly standard make-money-from home affairs.

As always, stay sharp.

After all the debate about disclosing security vulnerabilities within software, Google is trying to reshape the process for fixing bugs. There has always been discussion on whether or not responsible disclosure was actually responsible or not, but it came to a head (at least from a media standpoint) last month with the Microsoft/Tavis Ormandy occurance.

Google Pushing To Redefine 'Responsible Disclosure'
This post from the Google Online Security Blog discusses what Google would like to see changed in the current "responsible disclosure" model. Currently, when a security researcher finds a vulnerability in a piece of software, that researcher is supposed to inform the software vendor privately of the risk. The bug is not supposed to be released to the public until a fix is released.

According to Google's blog post, "The emotionally loaded name suggests that it is the most responsible way to conduct vulnerability research - but if we define being responsible as doing whatever it best takes to make end users safer, we will find a disconnect. We've seen an increase in vendors invoking the principles of "responsible" disclosure to delay fixing vulnerabilities indefinitely, sometimes for years; in that time frame, these flaws are often rediscovered and used by rogue parties using the same tools and methodologies used by ethical researchers. The important implication of referring to this process as "responsible" is that researchers who do not comply are seen as behaving improperly. However, the inverse situation is often true: it can be irresponsible to permit a flaw to remain live for such an extended period of time."

This does not seem like the best system to have in place for protection of the end user. Basically, this is saying that because security researchers are not allowed to release details of a bug to the public until there is a fix, there is no reason for the vendor to take action. It also takes notice of the fact that by using the term 'responsible' disclosure, it is barring anyone from breaking with the mold by labeling them as irresponsible.

Despite what it may seem like, Google is not trying to plunge us into a state of anarchy by proposing a full-disclosure method of dealing with bugs. They want to find a balance, where end users receive security updates in a timely manner, and software vendors have enough time to provide those fixes to the users. Their suggestion? A 60 day window between being informed of the vulnerability and having a fix available to to the public. In this situation, everybody wins.

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