Don't Be Evil–Just Serve Ads on It

Looks like Google’s Blogger is a more popular blogging platform than WordPress and Moveable Type, after all–in some circles, anyway. Internet security outfit Sophos says it detects just over 16,000 malicious Web pages each day, and nearly 2 percent of them are hosted on Blogger. “The number one host for malware on the web is Blogger (Blogspot.com), which allows computer users to make their own Web sites easily at no charge,” Sophos said in its 2008 Security Threat Report (PDF), adding that between malicious blogs and malicious comments posted to otherwise benign blogs, Blogspot.com accounts for two percent of all of the world’s malware hosted on the Web.

And Google (GOOG) is serving up ads on it.

To be fair, though, it’s no easy task for the search giant to keep Blogger malware-free. So in some sense, the fact that the service hosts just two percent of all malware and not 20 percent is an achievement, as Sophos’s Graham Cluley notes. “If you think about it, Blogger/Blogspot’s position is probably not surprising–it’s a phenomenally popular platform for people to create their own Web pages (blogs), and gives Internet users the ability to comment on other people’s blogs,” Cluley said in a post to his blog. “Inevitably, there are ne’er-do-wells out there who will try and abuse a great service like that, and try and plant malware and malicious links. For its part, Google–the company who own Blogspot–takes security seriously, and works hard to shut down Web pages serving up malware.”