Google goes bonkers, FALSELY says NYT, WashPo, TeleRead harbor malware
Just now, Google scared us and a good part of the rest of the virtual world—with a kind of Halloween II, or maybe April Fool’s Day.
When I looked up something on TeleRead, I got a malware alert. For a time the Google-supplied link wouldn’t even let people into the site.
BUT guess what. A similar message appeared when I Googled up the New York Times, the Washington Post and a minor site in North Carolina. I doubt that an evil hacker would have infected all those places simultaneously.
For now, the message is gone. Whew! I wonder what caused it. Nothing like the joys of centalized information resources, eh? This is another reminder that even big companies well-stocked with Mensa-brilliant programmers are not error-free. In e-book terms, it’s why I’m so keen on the option of localized storage of prized books.
Update, 11:03 Washington time: TechCrunch item, complete with screen shots.
January 31st, 2009 at 10:53 am
That’s right, we had it in Europe too, oops!
My 10 year-old nephew called me: “What’s wrong with my iMac?”
January 31st, 2009 at 11:47 am
Google does seem to have a problem in this area. The same thing happened to me about a month ago and, if my memory is correct, the site was Apple.com.
Look around online (i.e. Google the right terms) and you’ll find a possible explanation. It has to do with the shortcuts they take to speed up processing. Sometimes those shortcuts lead to a false positive for malware.
January 31st, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Register article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/31/google_malware_snafu/
January 31st, 2009 at 1:56 pm
I had it earlier today as well when trying to get to a specific Nokia site.
January 31st, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Here’s the reason why this happened:
Someone at Google is having a very bad start to their weekend. Google’s VP of Search Products Marissa Mayer has just responded to the issue today that marked all Google results with the warning “This site may harm your computer” and advised users not to visit them.
The problem, she says, was simple human error: when importing the malware list from StopBadware.org, the URL ‘/’ was unintentionally added, meaning that every website would be included. The explanation in full:
If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.
We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.
Thanks for your understanding.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experienc