For a short time this morning, Google listed every site on the Internet as malware.
According to TechCrunch and CNET, every site found via Google search worldwide was flagged with this message: "This site may harm your computer."
Twitter was awash in the news this morning, with thousands of people posting about their kindred experiences with Google search.
Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products & user experience, attributed the problem to "human error" in a blog posting just after 9 a.m. PST. But about 30 minutes later, a blog posting on StopBadware.org--the other party apparently involved in the issue--disputed her explanation.
Here is Mayer's 9:02 a.m. PST posting in its entirety:
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. Contd at; http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10153942-92.html
Last edited by techy on 31st January 2009, 7:08 pm; edited 1 time in total
According to TechCrunch and CNET, every site found via Google search worldwide was flagged with this message: "This site may harm your computer."
Twitter was awash in the news this morning, with thousands of people posting about their kindred experiences with Google search.
Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products & user experience, attributed the problem to "human error" in a blog posting just after 9 a.m. PST. But about 30 minutes later, a blog posting on StopBadware.org--the other party apparently involved in the issue--disputed her explanation.
Here is Mayer's 9:02 a.m. PST posting in its entirety:
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. Contd at; http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10153942-92.html
Last edited by techy on 31st January 2009, 7:08 pm; edited 1 time in total