After Irreal’s recent malware incident I’ve been keeping an eye out for ways to avoid any further exploits and for taking remedial action in case Irreal is reinfected. The particular piece of malware that attacked Irreal was only interested in Windows machines running either Internet Explorer or Firefox and therefore only injected code for those systems.
One of the problems with that is that it’s hard for those of us running other OSs or browsers to test for and find infected sites. As it turns out, Google offers a useful tool that does just that. The fetch-as-google tool allows you to see the site as the Google crawler does. This is a really handy debugging tool and one that everyone maintaining an Internet site should be familiar with.
I learned about it from this post on Matt Cutt’s blog. The tool itself is available from the Google Webmaster Tools, which has many useful tools for webmasters. Again, if you’re responsible for a Web site be sure to take a look at Cutt’s post and checkout Google Webmaster Tools.