During the next three years, the organizations will work together on issues ranging from educating small businesses about badware to developing approaches to help smartphone phone users protect their handsets.

StopBadware has previously worked to develop transparency, educational resources and an appeals process for websites blacklisted for having badware content. The organization also will soon release a set of best practices to help Web-hosting providers address reports of badware on their networks.

“We at StopBadware are eager to combine our own expertise with Verizon’s  to better defend Internet users,” StopBadware said in a blog post.

“We’re particularly excited about drawing on Verizon’s resources and knowledge to bolster conversation surrounding the mobile malware threat and innovative ways to combat it, like identifying new approaches to securing mobile handsets.”

Other companies that support StopBadWare include Google, Mozilla, PayPal, and Nominum.

This change should be viewed as more evolutionary than revolutionary; like before, StopBadware will work to minimize the threat of malware, and at the moment, nothing more significant than some colors, logos, and site content has been changed.

Urs Gasser, executive director of the Berkman Center, also explained in a statement that StopBadware is just following a path taken by previous Berkman Center ventures like Creative Commons and Global Voices.

And as mentioned earlier, it’s doing so with the support of a lot of important companies.  Google, PayPal, and Mozilla all provided funding for StopBadware’s launch, and one person from each group will now sit on its board of directors.  Notably, "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf is Google’s representative.

Anyway, a hat tip goes to Elinor Mills, and we’ll see what happens.  In a blog post, Maxim Weinstein, StopBadware’s executive director, did encourage onlookers to "watch for more changes, both aesthetic and substantive, as we embark on this new adventure."

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Google Updates Webmaster Malware Reviews

Google and StopBadware.org have been providing a service to users of the search engine by warning of links to potentially dangerous sites. Such warnings may be news to webmasters of those sites, as they may not realize they have been compromised.

Google improved upon its communication with those webmasters, as noted in an update to the Google Webmaster Central blog. The process for removing malware warnings from a cleaned-up site should be quicker now.

After reviewing Webmaster Tools for URLs Google considers dangerous, the webmaster can make changes and request a malware review from Google. If it clears the review, malware messages should be removed within 24 hours, generally.

If the review finds more problems, Google will update the list of dangerous URLs it has detected for webmasters to check. Causes of positive detections can vary; StopBadware lists common threats that will cause Google to warn people against continuing to a site from the search results.

This would generally be seen as a good thing except that none of it was true. It caused traffic at the Mister Poll site to drastically drop. The blog at the Mister Poll site said,” If they receive an anonymous complaint about a web site, they will put you on a “bad” list which is then supplied to Google, who is also one of their financial investors. Google immediately blocks all search results to that web site with that horrific, and in my view libelous, warning.”

According to the blog post they had no prior warning from Google or Stopbadware that their site was being flagged for malware. Mister Poll said had they been notified of any security issue they would have corrected it immediately. Normally the only way for a site to be taken off the list is a 10-day appeal process through Stopbadware.com.

Mysteriously Google had taken the warning down the next day. Again the site owners received no communication from either Goggle or Stopbadware. “I’ve received no communications from Google or StopBadware, so I don’t know what triggered them to correct things. I can’t help but think it was due to the buzz this generated and the complaints that many of you sent their way. The timing is very coincidental, and the fact that it happened early on a Saturday with no feedback from their official appeals process would seem to confirm this. I truly thank you all for your help.”

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Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.