Pramatr Blog » Malware http://www.pramatr.com/blog A collection of articles from pramatr.com on technology, security, software and anything we find interesting Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:48:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Google Reports The Entire Internet As Malware http://www.pramatr.com/blog/2009/01/31/google-reports-the-entire-internet-as-malware/ http://www.pramatr.com/blog/2009/01/31/google-reports-the-entire-internet-as-malware/#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 16:28:47 +0000 pramatr http://pramatr.com/?p=396 For about twenty minutes today google has been reporting every single website as malware. Any search within google returned the normal search results, but every result also included a report that “this site may harm your computer“. Attempting to click on the search result and progress to the actual website returns a warning page with no possible way of clicking through to the resulting page. Google was effectively blocking every single search result from reaching it’s destination.

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I read a thorough discussion of the malware behaviour many months ago, but I don’t think this is quite what google were looking for when they implemented the feature. I’m sure there are a great many retailers who are cursing at potentially lost revenue and users who are now unsure if a website is harmful or not. False positives are never helpful to users who are unsure about their actions at the best of times. Thankfully, the problem seems to be sorting itself out and only seemed to last for twenty minutes. It’s not yet apparent whether the issue has been rectified or simply that the feature has been disabled altogether. It will be very interesting to see how this one is explained!

Update: It seems the problem was bigger than I thought.

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