Google warns whole internet is malware

I got surprised, when I searched in google at 9.10am PST. Yes, the surprise and shock news is that, Google search results reported “This site may harm your computer” for any and every search query.

Google responded to problem through a blog posting just after 9am PST :

If you did Google search between 6:30am PST and 7.25am PST, you likely saw the message “This site may harm your computer” for every search results. This was an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

So, what really happend between 6.30am PST to 7.25am PST ?. Google said, it was human error that caused this problem. Google flags with the message “This site may harm your computer” to protect his users from that particular website. Google does this job with help of third party called StopBadware.org. StopBadware.org is company that provides list of URL that spreads or install malware to the user computer. Google 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.

The bug has been fixed immediately. Google added, that it will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

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