“Warning: Visiting This Web Site May Harm Your Computer!”, Google: “Our Bad”

Google suffered the glitch of all glitches earlier this morning.

If you happened to be doing a search on Google, you likely got this message when you clicked on one of the results:

"Warning: Visiting This Web Site May Harm Your Computer!"

Of course, this message appeared on EVERY single result.  I even got the message when trying to  navigate to my local library branch's website.  What are those libraries trying to pull these days, I thought.

Google seems to have bee testing out a new malware algorithm, however, which accidentally labeled the entire internet as malware.  They had this to say on their blog:

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.

Or, in other words, "Sorry, our bad."

Actually, Google seems to have accidentally placed the warning right on the search engine results page itself as well.  Here is an image of what you likely saw (thanks to TechCrunch for the snapshot):

When clicking on a result, you were then promted to head over to StopBadware.org.

I would venture to guess that, on Monday, someone at the Googleplex is going to have a very bad day.

If you do think that your computer might be at risk, we highly recommend that you do a quick sca with PC Bug Doctor, the most comprehensive virus scanner on the market today.

Happy surfing.

UPDATE: Looks like even Gmail was affected.  Read more here.

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Technorati Tags: Google, Google malware, Google Safe Browsing, StopBadware.org, Warning: Visiting This Web Site May Harm Your Computer!

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