CYBERSPACE – Google, using data supplied by the Stop Badware Coalition (SBC), has begun “flagging” sites that contain malicious code and directing users who are about to visit such flagged sites to a warning page.Google users who attempt to visit sites that have been identified by the SBC as high-risk are directed to a page with a boldface message that reads “Warning – the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!” The warning page also advises users that they can “learn more about malware and how to protect yourself at StopBadware.org”

The SBC is a joint, non-profit effort lead by Harvard University and the University of Oxford, with corporate support from Google, Sun Microsystems, and the Lenovo Group.

According to John Palfrey, professor at Harvard Law and a principal member of the SBC, the warning pages are not intended to prohibit users from reaching certain pages, simply to warn them of the risk and to encourage users to educate themselves on the subject of malware.

“We’re not going to say don’t do it,” Palfrey told ZDnet.com. “What we want to do is basically give people some more information about what might happen to their computer.”

Palfrey compared the SBC’s campaign to a kind of “neighborhood watch” program, noting that the sites in question are not removed from search engines entirely, just flagged as potentially problematic or damaging.

Suspect sites are often reported to the SBC by web users, but Palfrey said sites are not flagged by the SBC until they have been checked by a human editor at the SBC.

The SBC began with the goal of simply identifying malicious programs and not necessarily to target sites that distributed such software. Palfrey said that the SBC initiated their campaign in part “to say that law in the ordinary sense of the word has not been doing a good job with these highly distributed problems – spyware or viruses or spam.”

Palfrey said that while the SBC has worked closely with Google, he hopes other search engines will follow suit and take advantage of the investigative work done by the SBC.

“We very much encourage other search engines to join and use the data in the same way,” said Palfrey. “We’re quite open.”