Google forewarns entire Internet is Malware

February 11, 2009 Computer News

For approximately an hour on Saturday morning, Google listed every site on the Internet as malware.

It took a couple of hours after the initial problem was solved to find out who was actually to blame – Google or a nonprofit known as StopBadware.org.

TechCrunch and CNET reported around 7 a.m. PST that every site found via Google search was flagged with this message: “This site may harm your computer.”

Just after 9 a.m. PST, in blog posting, Marissa Mayer, Google Vice President, credited the problem to “human error” and to a URL list provided by StopBadware.org. Approximately 30 minutes later, a blog posting on StopBadware.org disputed her explanation. An hour later, Mayer posted Google’s mea culpa.

Mayer acknowledged that StopBadware.org did not provide the wrong information and that it was solely Google’s fault (human error). The URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. She apologized and promised that it would not happen again.

Maxim Weinstein, Manager of StopBadware stated that Mayer’s posting was incorrect. He said that StopBadware.org does not provide the data for these warnings. Their role is to use the data provided to them by Google for research/analysis, to support/assist webmasters in cleaning up sites and navigating the review process when their sites are clean, and to provide a third-party review when users hit roadblocks with Google’s own process. Their site was taken down as a result of extremely heavy traffic due to the Google glitch, which led many users to seek additional information.

As StopBadware.org is mentioned on the Google warning page that users see when they click on a search result that Google has flagged as bad, many people associated the warnings with them.

After a follow-up e-mail, Weinstein wrote that he was satisfied with Google’s corrected response.