Google taking security a little too seriously?

Google taking security a little too seriously?

It looks like Google is marking all of its search results with the warning “This site may harm your computer.”

If you click on a Google result link in spite of the warning, you get an interstitial page with an additional warning: “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!”

Clicking the warning itself will take you to this page, which explains that “This warning message appears with search results we’ve identified as sites that may install malicious software on your computer.”

The server(s) that hosts that page seems to be getting hammered right now. No surprise. So is StopBadware.org, a site Google refers its users to for more information.

And so is the Google server that provides more detailed diagnostics for sites allegedly failing Google’s safety tests, such as this report for the presumably clean Wikipedia site.

Coincidentally, I was reviewing the diagnostics page just yesterday for a site that had been infected by malware. The diagnostics page identified the origin of the malware that Google spotted on the server it was warning about. I wonder what, if anything, Google is saying about all these allegedly infected sites this morning… especially since Google is warning about its own site as well, if your search encompasses one of Google’s own pages.

Something, I think, is amiss in Mountain View…

UPDATE: Todd Gardner suggests this problem was caused by an outage at StopBadware.org. If so, Google needs to rethink its failsafe strategy for this data source.

UPDATE 2: Google seems to be working normally again.

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