Google Notifications for Software Upgrade Now In Webmaster Tools

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It has been a year since Google started providing alerts to webmasters for security holes in their websites that makes it vulnerable to attacks. In fact, the message center within Webmaster tools became their avenue in spreading the word to website owners with potentially hackable sites.

This time around, Google will not only isolate potentially vulnerable software packages, but also notify webmasters about the most recent version releases of the software packages or plugins they’re running on their site which would help webmasters to make informed decisions if they would want to upgrade or not. These notifications will be visible via the message center.

Google sees appending a generator meta tag to specify the software version number help in parsing source code pages that Google will crawl to identify vulnerable sites. Difference in opinions question the security of placing version number in source codes for fear that once worm writers knew it; they would know the type of exploit a website can be susceptible but Google thinks otherwise.

Google blog mentions sending out the first of these messages soon so watch out for it.

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