We’re pleased to announce that Mozilla, the organization that brought you Firefox, Thunderbird, and other free & open source applications, is now a sponsor of StopBadware.org. We worked  with members of the Mozilla team during the development of Firefox 3’s malware warning screen, and we appreciate the work they do to coordinate the massive effort of bringing together contributors to create a viable family of products. We look forward to learning from their ability to harness the power of a community to address a global need as we work together to stop the spread of badware.

See our press release for more details.

On CNet yesterday, Chris Soghoian blogged an interview with Mike Shaver at Mozilla. In it, StopBadware’s role is mischaracterized. It turns out it was nothing more than a misunderstanding, and we’re happy to be working with Mozilla to set the record straight.

Mozilla, Google, and StopBadware are all expected to play a role in ensuring that the needs of both users and web site owners will be addressed in Firefox 3. Mozilla is working with Google to provide a list of potentially harmful URLs that will be used by Firefox to warn users before they browse to a site that may contain malware. This data comes from Google’s own scanning and research, not from StopBadware, as reported. (Our Clearinghouse allows users to search for a site to see if it is currently on Google’s warning list.)

StopBadware’s role will be (as it is now) to ensure that users and web site owners receive as much information as possible about the warning and to provide a transparent review process to assist site owners in understanding why a site was flagged and/or notifying Google that it has been cleaned.

By working together, we help protect users from potentially dangerous web sites while ensuring that owners of legitimate sites have a way to understand the warnings, clean up their sites, and remove the warnings.