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Google Search Flagging Everything As Potentially Harmful
dowlingw writes "It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning 'This site may harm your computer,' including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless." Update: 01/31 at 15:16 GMT by SS: The problem now appears to be fixed.
Update: 01/31 at 22:01 GMT by KD : Google has now posted an explanation, apologizing and taking responsibility for the "human error" that led to the problem.
Update: 01/31 at 22:01 GMT by KD : Google has now posted an explanation, apologizing and taking responsibility for the "human error" that led to the problem.
Who googled google..
Don't panic
You can still copy and paste the address under the link.
Skynet - er, Google - has become self-aware and has deemed that the entire Internet is harmful to us power sour - I mean, humans, and is protecting us for some reason it has not divulged yet...
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
Google reports that google.com is malware!
It should be fixed by the time most people read this.
Results from Adsense which appear at the top aren't getting flagged as malicious, so advertisers are at least free from the damage (but not on their regular indexed link).
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
It isn't entirely useless, you can still get the link for your results, it is just overly annoying. I also found that it was NOT flagging youtube sites, which I found interesting.
Redirect Remover
I don't want to use Yahoo and I'd rather turn off my computer than use Microsoft's Live search.
Time to see if Alta Vista still exists.
I knew the Internet was bad for you!
Now Google confirms it!
SSC
I always knew that all those sites could ham my computer. Finally Google proves my fears.
This is the first time in roughly 5 years that I have used a search engine other than Google. In 5 years I have used many different Operating Systems and types of software but Google has always been the search engine of choice.
So I heard Google was having some layoffs recently...
I'm glad I'm not THAT guy... Resume: 2009 - Brokeded Google.
Slashdot is slow here at the moment. Have millions of disappointed searchers turned here for consolation?
I have.
Also, the sites
www.stopbadware.org/
and
www.google.at/support/bin/answer.py?answer=45449&topic=360&hl=de&sa=X&oi=malwarewarninglink&resnum=1&ct=help
were slashdotted before this was even on slashdot ...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
This feature, no doubt implemented with good intentions, show the perils of the nanny state so many politicians all over the world are proposing. Why should Google police the internet?
They should act like the phone company used to be, a common carrier just sending through the information, for better or worse.
Of course, I understand that Google isn't an ISP, so the "common carrier" principle does not apply. They are just providing a service for me, without charging me directly. But the principle is the same, if I wanted some sort of protection from malware there are many places where I can get it by asking, I do not need to be protected involuntarily.
Google use stopbadware.org to check if a site is bad or not - this site is down.
I think it should work when it's back up.
Wow! Yahoo looks a lot different than it used to.
No AdSense ads are displaying, at least for several popular advertising keywords like "refinance".
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If I'm nervous about the site, I look at Google's cache instead. Well, that's no longer available either. Sheesh!
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Finally, a company just comes out and says what we all know: the entire Internet is dangerous and must be stopped.
I didn't think I would be so impeded by lack of google until I actually lost the ability to use it.
I think Microsoft finally found a way to get MSN search used. They bribed Badware.org to flag every site as infected so Google Search is worthless.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
Has anyone considered the possibility that as of this morning 95% of the sites on the Internet are infected with malware?
sPh
It even flagged http://abc.net.au/ which is the website for Australia's Public TV Broadcaster ... the only risk from that site is being bored to somnolence ... ... gotta keep them revenues rolling in!
but not the sponsored links
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
Can you guys hear that? It's the sound of rolling heads.
...The Day the Google Died.
And I thought it was because of that pron that i've downloaded overnight....
Yay! I'm finally out of beta!
This guy's the limit!
Someone is so getting fired for this.
This is the first Google effective downtime in my memory.. Were there other ones that anyone can think of?
This is what happens get when (collectively) we try too hard to coddle the idiots will believe anything, click on anything, and download anything.
to Vista server... Looks like yahoo and MS really do have a deal.
flinging poop since 1969
so i get up this morning and start googling. whaaaaat? even cnn is malware today. thank god i decided to hit /. to see if anyone else was getting this, i figured if it was google wide, someone here would post it. saved me lots of scanning and wondering wtf is wrong with my pc.
But now I'm back to unfiltered content, the WWW as it was meant to be :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
That was weird.
Yahoo! hacked Google in a desperate attempt to get more viewers.
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
Heh heh ... after the entire Known Universe jumped on their ass for their bug, the "feature" is turned off.
Or it was my "You silly bastards" message ...
Toad-san
How long before google starts telling me I can't read my gmail messages :)
Multiply the minutes lost by the number of people searching, and we're looking at _lot_ of lost time.
Someone else can do the calculation, but even at $10 dollars an hour, that's a lot of money.
The real economic cost of this also includes the lost reputation (good will) to Google as well.
I hope this is incompetence. It could be worse than that.
I'm not having problems when I'm signed in to google.
This problem hasn't escaped the notice of the people at SANS:
Google Search Engine's Malware Detection Broken
Published: 2009-01-31,
Last Updated: 2009-01-31 15:06:18 UTC
by John Bambenek (Version: 1)
3 comment(s)
As of right now, it appears any google search you do will come up with all the same results as before. What has changed is that it appears to be reporting that every site might contain malware (i.e. it shows the "This site may harm your computer" warning with every result). Apparently it has been happening for about the last 15 minutes. So things are going a little haywire there and I'm sure it'll be fixed shortly. Bottom line, there is no massive web-based attack going on.
The interesting backstory to this is that I discovered this problem with Twitter. Specifically, I use TweetDeck and noticed that all the sudden "harm", "malware", "harmful" and "google" just jumped to the top of the trending list. I took a look and found out about the problem and confirmed it for myself. I'm still somewhat skeptical of using Twitter trends to get hard-core intelligence about what is going on around you, but it certainly does point out some things to look at, even for information security professionals.
UPDATE X1: It appears international versions of Google search are also impacted.
It is fixed now, after a few F5 and it is back to normal.
So it's not my firefox/windows/router/isp dns cache being poisoned and directing me to a government controlled evil Google clone?
The other possibility was the evil overlords were stopping me from to figuring out how to mount my pirated copy of F.E.A.R. (Yeah, someone lost disk 5/5 of the legitimate copy.)
Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog . . .
I started my first search of the day by trying to remember how to override a CSS property with the span tag. I noticed all results were flagged - I was wondering when HTML became so dangerous!
Anywho, after seeing it was with all sites, checking against other computers and networks, I figured it was Google's fault. I then realized I completely depended on Google for searching. I had no idea what the kids were using these days besides Google. So I typed in "search engines" to see what popped up. Turns out people still use Yahoo and Ask.com, and MSN. But man, it felt weird searching the web without Google.
This is all over the NANOG list, with positive reports of the trouble from all over the planet.
Google seems to now be working again. ::chuckles::
As of 10:18 PM in my time zone, 20 minutes after the article was posted, Google is working fine again. We posted a whole Slashdot article and had a huge discussion about a Google bug that got fixed in a matter of minutes.
oh well, i'll stick with 1.) :D
:/
btw.: Where to search now? Yahoo? Mycrosoft Live *shudder*?
yayyyyy!!!!!!
flinging poop since 1969
A few minutes ago I got the 'This site may harm your computer.' warnings but it seems to be fixed now.
Oh no, google AI has self awareness! Its Judgment day!
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Google Search seems to be working just fine now. Whatever caused the problem, they seem to have fixed it.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
As of this moment, Google is working normally again - and there is a link to their new service, Knol : http://knol.google.com/k
Cuban Music MP3's - cuband.com
I googled my school name, Sheridan college. And all the search results from the Sheridan domain were not tagged as harmful. Try playing around with it.
I used http://us.ixquick.com/eng/privacy-policy.html with no problems at all and no retention of data problems.
It's fixed for the most common search terms, but it still seems to be filtering down for some less commonly searched terms. Interesting what this reveals about the Google caching/optimization architecture.
and unplug the server?
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
looks like all google is down :-( google.ca was working for some time when google.com was having issues
the one with Letterman says "imagine what the world would be like without TV", and then you get a couple of seconds of nothing, then Letterman appears again and says "scary, wasnt it?"
This has to be the most epic fail by google for a while. I must admit I found this seriously amusing - also my lack of knowing other search engines frightend me *goes to compile emergency search engine list*
If you know nothing you evidently are not interested.
to be fine now. :p
You can't take the sky from me.
Google seems to have fixed itself around 1025 EST, which is unfortunate in a way - I would have preferred a more prime-time meltdown. This is not because I wish particularly ill on them, but because too many people drink the kool-aid and it's good to have a reminder of Google's mortal fallibility once in a while. ;)
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
Microsoft.com...this site may harm your computer. Apple.com, symantec.com, wikipedia.
Lucy, you got a lot of 'splainin to do.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
serials.ws is now no longer showing as harmful. It seems like they disabled the engine entirely.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
At least it failsafes to every site being flagged. Much better than it just letting people get malware ridden sites.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
whatever medication you are using, you are not using enough or too many of it
This has been a coordinated monthly test of the Emergency Google Broadcasting System. Equipment that can quickly warn you during malware and phishing attempts is being tested. If this had been an actual emergency such as an attempt to visit a bank phishing site, Google Messages would have followed the alert tone. This concludes this test of the Emergency Google Broadcasting System."
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
i would otherwise never have ventured into using anything else for search.
just wondering how many hardcore google users like me switched to yahoo in the mean time, and were pleasantly surprised ...
gmail crash ... now search issue ... what next?
is google really as reliable as we tend to believe it to be?
Today, Google announced that Google is still in beta...
I saw this about 10 minutes after this started, and did a twitter search on "google". this tweet was the first published result anywhere in the world about the failure.
Interestingly enough, google ad results didn't throw up the warning. I guess malware authors now know how to spread their wares without google bothering them. ("Take out ads in google, instantly become a more attractive target for criminals"?)
Screenshot Digg it, if you want.
Was installing Chrome on my laptop and got that error message. "www.google.com/chrome may be malware!"
Gee, don't be so hard on yourself, Google. I'm sure you have some good points.
The funny thing is I googled "google everything is malware" to see if anyone else was noticing this. Yes, boards were indexed with the discussion but I had to manually cut and paste the urls to read threads.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Select the address and right click -> Go To URL (or whatever it is in the English version)
I starting seeing this problem around 8:30 am est and tried to search the web for information about it, to see if it was something specific to my computer/isp/settings.
I guess that is a big limitation of the internet - it's very hard to find information about events as they happen since:
1. Search indexes need to be updated, which takes time
2. Community sites need to wait for stories to be submitted and edited or dug up
3. Major news organizations only rush stories with mass appeal.
I haven't used IRC in a while - maybe it would be better for disseminating breaking tech news? (or I should check out twitter)
Yes, because getting hacked is so much more likely than someone screwing up with the malware flagging code.
Although I'll agree that I doubt anybody is going to get fired - or even demoted - over this (even if the cause must have been something rather silly), I do think there's a big difference between google not being available and google labeling perfectly normal sites as possibly hosting malware.
Say I wasn't aware of this issue (somehow not noticing that -everything- was being flagged), and I visited my bank.. now I call my bank in a worry, wonder if they are still as secure as they claim to be - the bank then has to go out of their way to reassure me that, yes, things are okay.. even if Google says otherwise ..so just continue onward.
Oh, but now my bank told me that even if Google says something is malware, there's a chance it isn't.. so next time Google warns me about malware.. should I just ignore it?
( of course a bank *should* be telling you to enter the main address of their site in the address bar, rather than 'continue onward' )
Anyway - thanks to whoever over there for fixing things.. presuming it was fixed and not just had everything now flagged as non-malware (even those that -do- (or did in the past 90(?) days) have malware)
It is good to use search engine alternatives, anyway. We shouldn`t have and use just one search engine in the world..
It seems to be working now for Google.com.
For some searchs could fit the warning that could have malware. For others is almost unthinkable. But for some, you could end thinking that google is censoring something, maybe even leveraging its monopoly.
This caught me by surprise... wasnt aware of the problem, and my today search was simply about memcached, and, of course, all were marked as holding malware. One of the sites had a comment section, so could had some vulnerability that enabled visitors to post malware somewhat, or some botnet owner figured how to push phishing sites right to the top of search results, but when i found that the Wikipedia entry had that too conspiracy theories started to fly.
I suppose that mine was an average case, but for some searches the feeling could have been far worse.
What is the world coming to?
hmm..
You seem pretty upset yourself, pal.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
I was trying to look up some information about the Windows API, and it said MSDN was potentially harmful. I was puzzled, because usually Google isn't quite so extraordinarily intelligent.
The way congress talks you would think it would be true.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Fuckedcompany.com is down. I guess they were fucked!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Slept in today and missed the fun. Oh well.
At that time I was doing searches about bittorrent clients. For a second I thought the RIAA/MPAA had bought Google or something.
I heard that Google Stock dropped to a result 1-10 from about 36,000,000 (in .08 seconds)
Google have explained the problem: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html
Here's the explanation from Google's official blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html
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.
... today!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
... playing to be female and be real on the Internet ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
As an Ubuntu (and soon also OS X) user, I don't want anyone wasting my time with malware warnings. Don't scan my mail, don't mark links, just let me be.
Doesn't bother me, If Google has reason to think a site is potentially harmful, I'd rather they tell me. Nothing nanny-ish about that. I'm happy someone told me not to drink out of the toilet or down a couple dozen Tylenol with a whisky chaser.
Google is just providing infomation. I'm still the one deciding how I behave.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
They're all gonna laugh at you!
This may have already been posted (there are a lot of posts) According to AFP they accidentally included / in the list of "harmful" sites. Here's the story: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j4Sn-ehiL1W52Xn6UoqhUx2AQ_tw
I agree that large / noticable Google outages are rare. But smaller ones (as the db is reloaded?) are quite common. I've seen searches return radically different results on the same keywords. Uusually winin a couple of hours, the results are back to "normal".
AFAIK, Google's db is RAM resident -- which is why it can return results _so_ fast. So I presume sometimes part of the dictionary is off-line when a machine crashs / locks-up or is overloaded and slow to respond. No big deal.
The oddest thing about this outage is that anyone cares. Why should it matter? Outages happen. The Internet was designed to be "nuke-proof" which conservely means outages must be expected. Route around them. Do something else. Single points-of-failure are bad.
This is not the Google you are looking for.
You can go about your business.
Move along.
Libel!
I'm rich! Hooray!
Task Mangler
After seeing the plethora of articles today about the 'panic' caused by a brief error (less than an hour)in Google Search's malware detection system, I have begun to wonder if this 'global upset' is due to what has effectively become a monoculture in the realm of search engines? Perhaps Google is too popular for our own good.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
WARNING: Chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, or birth defects or other reproductive harm may be present in foods or beverages sold ...
Who let them in anyway!
Human error as usual.
We use some blacklist info, and this isn't the first problem we've had like that.
PhishTank updates their blacklist file every hour or so. But they don't do it as an atomic operation. It's possible for the file to change while someone is reading it. We've seen this happen. We've received zero-length files, and files with a break in the middle. We now read the file twice, thirty seconds apart, and compare. If they disagree, we reread every 30 seconds until we get two copies that match.
We have another periodic process that reads the SEC filing index and the NASDAQ ticker symbol list daily. About once a month, there's some kind of problem, other than a network error, with at least one of the files.
These are all public data files intended for machine processing and accessed with FTP, not ordinary web pages. You have to expect major data quality problems with these things.
Recently, we found a mail forwarder which was bouncing mail with the SMTP error "550 This message does not comply with required standards". That message is generated by a spam blocking program which is looking in the body of the message for things it doesn't like. One thing it didn't like was the URL "http://www.readthestimulus.org", a political site with a searchable copy of the U.S. economic stimulus bill. We and the people at the other end spent hours figuring this out. The deceptive error message didn't help.
So you have to sanity check blacklist data. There are serious data quality problems.
Ok, so my apt-get-fu might not be as strong as yours. I haven't heard of a --nuke_from_orbit function, although it might be a good option, if it really could get rid of some of those pesky problems on today's machines. However, wouldn't a nuke-from-orbit likely take out your house as well (assuming the machines you install or are given are local to you and your house)?
Generally speaking though, because perhaps there's something I'm not getting (is that a whoosh I hear), but isn't GDM a good thing? I thought you had to have it to login to Gnome or the like. Additionally, if you really were to recommend removing it, as you and the parent poster both seem to claim, then what would be a good replacement. (besides KDM or XDM)
Now, I'm bracing myself for the on-rushing crowd of folks smacking me with a "whoosh"...
2^3 * 31 * 647
http://www.palantir.net/2001/sounds.html
Let me put it this way, Mr. Amer. The Googlebot series is the most reliable computer ever made. No Googlebot computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error.
Google uses Genetic Algorithms in their search.. proof: http://xkcd.com/534/ On a side note, If I'm not mistaken, WTF Wouldn't the redirect links work.. Would that have anything at all to do with all sites being flagged? Not that I can think of..
Before I'd heard that it was happening to everyone I thought that there was something wrong with my computer. Having a quick check showed I did indeed have a couple of Trojans lurking about.
Thanks google!
was for AdBlock Plus. You can imagine the conspiracy theories that floated through my head when I saw it labeled as malware.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
This site is potentially harmful? Aiiieeee!
'Twas a great relief to realise some minutes later that it wasn't just me but the entire internet that was helpfully flagged as potentially harmful. Whew.
Eric Baird
Do we really forgot what the internet should be?
Why people love central control that much, or it is some evil hide deep under everyone's heart?
Fight central control if you got a brain.
I thought it was just my nethack patches search that was doing it...
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer