Google Blames Human Error for Malware Warning Mistake
Someone at Google is having a very bad start to their weekend. Google’s VP of Search Products Marissa Mayer has just responded to the issue today that marked all Google results with the warning “This site may harm your computer” and advised users not to visit them.
The problem, she says, was simple human error: when importing the malware list from StopBadware.org, the URL ‘/’ was unintentionally added, meaning that every website would be included. The explanation in full:
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 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.
Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.
Thanks for your understanding.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experienc
An easy mistake to make, of course, but even a small error is big news when millions of people are using your service every minute of the day. Props to Google for responding so quickly, particularly during a weekend.
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