This site may harm your computer - Google

HUMAN ERROR : This site may harm your computer - Google

"This site may harm your computer" on every search result on Google

Ankur Goyal

CPRCC

01 Feb 2009

On Saturday, Google search users were surprised and puzzled to find the message "This site may harm your computer" on every search result. This happened at about Indian Standard Time (IST) 7 pm on Saturday 31 January 2009 and lasted for about 1 hour.

Even many powers users thought that their computer has been hacked, compromised or made part of Botnet.

Later Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience of Google clarified that it was a HUMAN ERROR, which let to worldwide scare between 06:27 am PST (Californian Time) and 07:25 am. PST.

The URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs

Following is the clarification from Google –

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

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 maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to 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.

See this explanation at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html