The glitch, warning that sites 'may harm your computer,' lasted about an hour
Human error caused a search-results glitch that returned the message "This site may harm your computer" for about an hour Saturday on Google Inc.'s Web site, the company said. The mistake was Google's, not StopBadware.org's, as was originally thought.
Google said it released an update Saturday morning to its list of Web addresses known to install malicious software and "unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs," wrote Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products and user experience, in an official Google blog post explaining the glitch. "Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file."
Mayer's original blog posting about the incident made it sound as if StopBadware.org was responsible for the error. StopBadware.org is a nonprofit organization that Google and other IT companies and academic institutions use to warn Internet users about sites known to install malware on computers that visit those sites. Mayer later posted an update clarifying that the problem was on Google's end.
More: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9127101&source=NLT_SEC
Human error caused a search-results glitch that returned the message "This site may harm your computer" for about an hour Saturday on Google Inc.'s Web site, the company said. The mistake was Google's, not StopBadware.org's, as was originally thought.
Google said it released an update Saturday morning to its list of Web addresses known to install malicious software and "unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs," wrote Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products and user experience, in an official Google blog post explaining the glitch. "Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file."
Mayer's original blog posting about the incident made it sound as if StopBadware.org was responsible for the error. StopBadware.org is a nonprofit organization that Google and other IT companies and academic institutions use to warn Internet users about sites known to install malware on computers that visit those sites. Mayer later posted an update clarifying that the problem was on Google's end.
More: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9127101&source=NLT_SEC
