A glitch in a computer security program embedded deeply into Google's search engine briefly prevented users of the popular search engine from visiting any Web sites turned up in search results this morning. Instead, Google users were redirected to page that warned: "This site may harm your computer."
Calls and e-mails sent to Google were not returned as of publication. I will update this blog if and when I hear back from them about the cause and length of this incident.
The problem, which appears to have been corrected by the time of publication, was related to Google's "Stop Badware" program, which is designed to keep Internet users from visiting sites that Google's bots have found try to install malicious software when users browse the sites.
I first learned of the blockage just before 10 a.m. ET, when my wife complained that Google was telling her that OfficeDepot.com was trying to attack our computer.
When I looked at the search results, I noticed that Google was reporting every single subdomain of OfficeDepot.com was hostile. After about five minutes of poring over the source code for those landing pages, nothing seemed amiss. That is, until I conducted a search for ".gov" and saw that Google was saying all of the sites returned -- even whitehouse.gov and cia.gov -- were malicious. Strangely enough, the Google News results returned in any search did not appear to have the Google-generated malware warning.
During the time Google's search engine was effectively blocking access to nearly every site in its database, I found that the company's "safe browsing diagnostics" page -- the one that lets a visitor to a blocked page see why Google's automated programs listed the site as harmful -- would not load. My guess is many, many people were trying to visit that site as a result of the glitch, and that the server simply couldn't handle the load.
Verizon's security folks also appear to have noticed the problem this morning, saying it looks like it lasted about an hour starting at 9:30 a.m. ET.
Update, 11:46 a.m.: Stopbadware.org, the consortium of industry and academia leaders that handles the database of sites Google lists as harmful, issued the following statement: "This morning, an apparent glitch at Google caused nearly every [update 11:44 am] search listing to carry the "Warning! This site may harm your computer" message. Users who attempted to click through the results saw the "interstitial" warning page that mentions the possibility of badware and refers people to StopBadware.org for more information. This led to a denial of service of our website, as millions of Google users attempted to visit our site for more information. We are working now to bring the site back up. We are also awaiting word from Google about what happened to cause the false warnings."
Update, 12:38 p.m. ET: Google has posted an update to its official Google blog that attributes this fairly major "oops" to human error: "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."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sec...?hpid=sec-tech
Google Listing ALL Gay Porn Sites As 'Harmful'
Originally Posted by IdolKnights
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks