Google taking security a little too seriously?

It looks like Google is marking all of its search results with this warning: "This site may harm your computer."

If you click on a Google result link in spite of the warning, you get an interstitial page with an additional warning: "Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!"

Clicking the warning itself will take you to this page, which explains: "This warning message appears with search results we've identified as sites that may install malicious software on your computer."

The server(s) that hosts that page seems to be getting hammered right now. No surprise. So is StopBadware.org, a site Google refers its users to for more information.

And so is the Google server that provides more detailed diagnostics for sites allegedly failing Google's safety tests, such as this report for the presumably clean Wikipedia site.

Coincidentally, I was reviewing the diagnostics page just yesterday for a site that had been infected by malware. The diagnostics page identified the origin of the malware that Google spotted on the server it was warning about. I wonder what, if anything, Google is saying about all these allegedly infected sites this morning... especially since Google is warning about its own site as well, if your search encompasses one of Google's own pages.

Something, I think, is amiss in Mountain View...

UPDATE: Todd Gardner suggests this problem was caused by an outage at StopBadware.org. If so, Google needs to rethink its fail-safe strategy for this data source.

UPDATE 2: Google seems to be working normally again.

UPDATE 3: According to a comment on this post by CNET user stopbadware, manager of StopBadware.org, and a blog post on that site titled Google glitch causes confusion, the problem was not with StopBadware.org.

UPDATE 4: According to this post on the official Google blog site by Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products & user experience, the problem was caused by a bad update to Google's list of malware-infected Web sites. As the post says, "the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs."

Mayer reports that the problem has been fully solved and promises that Google "will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again."

[bighamuse]

Googles own webpage has been flagged as harmful. Ha ha wake up GOOGLE !!!

[bamike]

Thanks Peter, looks like you are the first to post this. I just noticed it. Please keep tabs on this situation, like many people my income depends on internet traffic. I will follow your column looking for updates.

Cheers
Mike in Buenos Aires

[Cartmanizm]

Nope, Whirlpool has it first:

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1134775

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

As Cartmanizm said, I definitely wasn't the first to post about it, except here on CNET. Anyway, the immediate problem appears to be solved, and I suspect some Google people are going to be working this weekend to resolve this apparent overdependence on StopBadware.org.

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

I admit I'm tempted to update the article to add FRIST PSOT! at the top.

. png

[bigbluerobot]

Using my iPhone's Safari browser I'm not getting the "This site may harm your computer" message.

[mdestries]

This is truly puzzling. Even my Webmaster Tools will occasionally flash a Malware warning one moment and then it will disappear the next. Not sure whether to dig into my site to see if anything is amiss or chalk it up to something brewing on Google's own servers. Even worse, if every site is reporting an error, how will Google know which ones are legit and which ones are fine? How automated is the web crawl to avoid sites like this?

Awesome. Eh.

[xeontis]

I'm tired of big brother/big corp trying to decide what I can and can not do or see. How are we supposed to trust any media or even anyting on the web when results to our queries are manipulated via geographic location, search patterns and click history.

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Uh, in what sense are your queries being manipulated?

Do you mean that the responses to your queries are being manipulated?

I know that the ads you see on Google can vary according to such factors, but if Google is selectively altering search _results_ on that basis, I haven't heard about it. Can you provide a source for this information?

[stuffnthings]

Peter, I started noticing that my clients would have different search results from our office back in 2005. Not just logged into our Google account, but actual SERP's would be different for keywords. It was not a huge difference, sometimes a page back in the results, but enough to notice that when I asked my clients to type in keywords on their dial up computer, they would not be looking at the same results we were looking at. We were in Ausitn, there in New Braunfels, not more than an hour away. Hope this helps somewhat confirm xeontis' claim.

Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google is also on the board of directors at Apple, and a Free Mason.

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Oh noes, a Freemason!

I have also noticed that Google results can vary from one user to another, but I think this is just a consequence of Google's rather loosely coupled site architecture-- it isn't exactly deterministic by design, more like herding cats.

[ZetaZeta_]

You can always continue to the page at your own risk by copying and pasting the URL. It's just a warning.

[rj3494]

Stopbadware.org has been flagged as well. Interesting Yahoo! is not flagged. Wonder if the sites been hacked!

[googleiscrap]

Yes,
too funny
If you google 'google'
it suggests that their site may harm your computer

[xeontis]

and now it's fixed....

[jsungu]

They are, intentionally or not, completely stoking adware revenues. It would be fascinating to see their revenue results for the last 30 minutes.

[jsungu]

Sorry, I meant adwords,

[mdestries]

I'm still seeing errors in Webmaster Tools -- even though Google's site diagnostic says everything is clean. Anyone else?

[parkjhca]

it seems resolved now....

[bamike]

As of 9:41 CST google webmaster tools is still showing the malware warnings, although the search results appear normal.

[nmabry]

The StopBadware.org outage is more likely a result of the Google problem and a sudden influx of visitors. It is doubtful that StopBadware.org's outage caused the Google problem. Todd Gardner's assessment is probably off here and the actual cause/effect should be reversed.

[stopbadware]

As the manager of StopBadware.org, I can confirm that nmabry is right: an apparent glitch at Google (we're still waiting for more info) caused the problem, leading to an effective denial of service attack against StopBadware.org, making our site unavailable. Full statement at http://blog.stopbadware.org/2009/01/31/google-glitch-causes-confusion

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Thanks for the information. I've updated the post with a link to that blog post, as well as to a confirming post on the official Google blog.

[perspectoff]

NoScript

is the Firefox plugin that allows the user to choose which scripts (Java, JavaScript), Flash content, cross-scripts, and other hazardous web content to display when you visit a web site.

Since most malware comes from this type of content, it is important to be very selective about what is allowed to run on a website and install on your computer.

It takes a little more effort to surf the web with NoScript (but it takes a lot of effort to get malware off your system or re-install a system crippled with malware).

[m0thman]

Yep, I noticed this as well. Thought I had a virus or sometihng, rebooted - the works. Even used Safari and Live.com - now how desperate is that?

[qb001]

This is an object lesson is Service Level Agreements in distributed systems. Basically, your SLA is only as good as your weakest link.

Even though the problem was caused by StopBadware.org, the responsibility is Google's since it affected their site. When building distributed systems, paranoia is a healthy attitude.

[hungryburgher]

I'm so glad it wasn't just me. How frustrating! I never thought google would be plagued with such a major problem. But it goes to show how much we all rely on google to navigate the internet.

[mkbcomputerrepair]

I just got this problem this morning after searching for "financial crisis conspiracy", every site listed in google had this warning about malicious software that your talking about. I immediately searched for something less controversial, "dhcp", a networking term, still all the results showed this warning. The solution: First I tried just deleting cookies to see if that would clear it up-no luck. I then used disk clean-up (Windows XP), and deleted everything that is available to delete. Worked right away, Google back to normal ! I suspect something happened with google using either the cookies or the Windows temp file (which gets deleted with disk cleanup). A couple of weeks ago I would click on Internet Explorer to get on the internet and when I went to Google, it would revert right away to the search results that you had previously gotten the last time you went online (the last thing that you searched for on Google). Just clearing the cookies got rid of this behavior. Weird.

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Actually, the problem was with Google.

There was no need to toss your cookies.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

[mkbcomputerrepair]

Interesting reading the comments about Stopbadware.org and Google. Sounds like the problem cleared up at the same time I was waiting 25 minutes for Windows XP to do the disk cleanup.

[Authortrek]

Great article, which I have referenced in my own account, which contains a poem that I have previously written about Google's monopolistic behavior: http://inprint.thesyp.org.uk/news.php?id=190

[Grifter02]

It's called monopolistic behavior when a company becomes popular now? I'm pretty sure they have lots of competition. And everything they offer is free, so who cares???