« Previous post
Next post »

October 7, 2006

Strange Things Afoot at the Google Blog

Michael Arrington

43 comments »

A bunch of people noticed a very odd post on the google blog tonight that suggested they were cancelling their click-to-call service (see below, captured by John Resig). Just a month ago Google expanded the click-to-call program into the UK.

The post was at googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-click-to-call-project-cancelled.html, although it has been removed now. Even though the blog post was quickly taken down, a number of people saw it on the blog or in their RSS readers. The message itself was certainly suspicious as it contains numerous spelling and grammatical errors as well as the curious last sentence saying that the “message has been translated using Google language tools.”

So the real story here is that the Google blog has been hacked. This is a bit of an embarrassment, although it is not nearly as bad as when Google deleted the blog accidentally in March of this year.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Google Blog Hacked « SkybirdSat

    October 8th, 2006 at 1:32 am

  2. Google foi Hackeado ??? « Déjà Vu

    October 8th, 2006 at 1:41 am

  3. links for 2006-10-08 at 琪缘的BLOG

    October 8th, 2006 at 9:07 am

  4. Four Reasons Google Wouldn’t Give Up on Click-to-Call -- Alec Saunders .LOG

    October 8th, 2006 at 11:05 am

  5. It’s Easy to Assume… » Socialitis

    October 8th, 2006 at 11:34 am

  6. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Googleのブログにあやしい投稿

    October 8th, 2006 at 4:50 pm

  7. Apogee Weblog | Official Google Blog Blogger Hacker?

    October 8th, 2006 at 5:51 pm

  8. Recognize Design :: Design, Marketing and Beyond » Google Buys YouTube! (Still not yet) Update #2

    October 8th, 2006 at 10:04 pm

  9. 구글 공식 블로그(googleblog) 해킹의 전말

    October 8th, 2006 at 11:21 pm

  10. The Teklow Group » Blog Archive » Google Blog hack

    October 9th, 2006 at 6:01 am

  11. Agylen » Security at the Google Blog

    October 9th, 2006 at 1:14 pm

  12. jonathan schellack » Google’s Blog Hacked

    October 9th, 2006 at 2:59 pm

  13. Google Problems Left and Right « Griffin Post

    October 18th, 2006 at 3:12 am

  14. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Google: Security Mishaps and User Trust

    October 18th, 2006 at 10:52 am

  15. Google Security Issues « Aleem’s Weblog

    October 18th, 2006 at 1:12 pm

  16. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » What Is The Definition Of A Blog?

    December 31st, 2006 at 2:57 pm

  17. Multimedias.mobi » What Is The Definition Of A Blog?

    December 31st, 2006 at 5:03 pm

  18. TechCrunch en français » Quelle est la définition d’un Blog?

    January 1st, 2007 at 12:51 am

  19. What Is The Definition Of A Blog?

    January 9th, 2007 at 1:36 am

  20. online poker strategien

    May 2nd, 2008 at 3:27 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. rulepark

    October 8th, 2006 at 12:03 am

    Rumour is true. There is a chinese proverb that says ” a tree would not shakes by itself, if the wind does not start blowing “….

    Good call though, GOO

  2. Amit Chowdhry

    October 8th, 2006 at 12:04 am

    “The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d’oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user.”

    Hahaha. I wonder if someone got fired for this one.

  3. pascal

    October 8th, 2006 at 12:21 am

    I am not surprised (if this information is true), what is interesting is that the majors totally elude the notion of a web call centre when they present pay per call; like Google and eBay who have announced partnerships.

    Click to call is not new, it’s already being offered by companies such as Ingenio or eStara, but in mixed mode, meaning that they mainly use traditional telephony, and little VOIP. Setting up advertising campaigns in Pay Per call makes using a cheap and VOIP web call centre indispensable.

    Traditional call centres are reserved to large companies, because of their technical and human infrastructure costs, and by their centralisation. It is unthinkable that e-commerce sites or SME’s could equip themselves with them.

    Contrarily to cost per click billed advertising where the web-user surfs onto a website without human assistance, only guided by hypertext links, the call by “click to call” goes directly to agents. From then you can’t imagine making those customers who clicked on the « click to call » button at the same time wait.

    In the same way, agents don’t need to be recruited and trained anymore, and calls must be distributed to existing company employees who have the technical and commercial knowledge.

  4. Azhar

    October 8th, 2006 at 1:05 am

    LOL, the owners of the largest blogging system in the world ; Blogger, don’t even know how to run their own blog. Now that’s irony.

  5. zslootsky@gmail.com

    October 8th, 2006 at 1:29 am

    If only goodle could take some more photos of how they get hacked. They we could get proof that they are spam. And that they are the greatest hackors of us all. Yo, they pwn you and you just get hijacked by the traffick and CPMs on tha shit. Please. Makes your own riginality already

  6. Daniel Haran

    October 8th, 2006 at 4:44 am

    The most ironic element? Just a day earlier they were posting “Our security stance“.

    Some hacker might have found the whole “responsible disclosure” on their linked security page a tad condescending?

  7. JP Morgan

    October 8th, 2006 at 7:16 am

    This is an odd posting. It certainly looks fake.

    I hate to start a rumor, but it could’ve very well been hacked by a competing click to call developer. Why else would someone go to all the trouble?

    Its kinda funny.

  8. Drama 2.0

    October 8th, 2006 at 7:39 am

    It might have been hacked, but has anybody considered the possibility that Chad Hurley is behind this? We know he’s been at Google HQ and has been given full access to everything at Google (Larry and Sergey’s offices, the PageRank algorithm and even the supersecret data centers). There are even rumors Marissa Mayer went out on a date with him to seal the YouTube deal. Perhaps after a wild, drunk party on the Google 747 party plane, an inebriated Chad decided to have some fun with the Google blog?

  9. Haochi

    October 8th, 2006 at 7:53 am

    It seems to be fake, here’s my reasons:
    1. These kind of announcements usually goes into Press Release first, not on the blog.
    2. As you noted, the last line of the post, “message has been translated using Google language tools”.
    3. Google not only deleted the post from the blog, Google’s Blog Search and Google Reader as well. (You can still find it on BlogLines though.)
    4.The poster’s name…Maximal? Unusual Google Blog poster.

  10. Varun Mathur

    October 8th, 2006 at 8:22 am

    how about a disgruntled google employee (if there is something like that)..?

  11. Rodolfo

    October 8th, 2006 at 10:37 am

    The most important is the power that hakers do.
    Best. Rodo.

  12. sufiy

    October 8th, 2006 at 10:58 am

    Google is entering into the stormy earnings season and everybody is getting nervous: trends are against its valuation and cofounders are angry: toys are not making money:

    http://photos1.blogger.com/blo.....0012.0.jpg

    http://sufiy.blogspot.com/

    Regards,

  13. Sam O

    October 8th, 2006 at 11:07 am

    How does this incident play in regards to Jonathan’s Schwartz’s open letter to the SEC that blogs should be an avenue, just like press releases and conference calls, to break news?

  14. steve

    October 8th, 2006 at 1:57 pm

    Om Malik from Giga OM reports this as a hoax..
    http://voip.gigaom.com/2006/10.....lled-hoax/

  15. steve

    October 8th, 2006 at 2:05 pm

    official update from google… http://googleblog.blogspot.com.....html#links
    About that fake post
    10/08/2006 01:52:00 PM

    Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

    A bug in Blogger enabled an unauthorized user to make a fake post on the Google Blog last night, claiming that we’ve discontinued our AdWords click-to-call test. The bug was fixed quickly and the post removed. As for the click-to-call test, it is progressing on schedule, and we’re pleased with the results thus far.

  16. Philipp Lenssen

    October 8th, 2006 at 2:55 pm

    JP Morgan writes
    > I hate to start a rumor, but it could’ve very well been
    > hacked by a competing click to call developer. Why else
    > would someone go to all the trouble?

    Hacker honor? Google in a previous post on security boasted how they were able to defeat the “bad guys”…

  17. Peter

    October 8th, 2006 at 5:44 pm

    dude - you missed the point. security. security. security. or lack thereof. the deletion of the blog is irrelevant. someone being able to hack into my blogger and find unpublished posts, post stuff in my name, possibly gain greater access to my personal data, by which to further compromise my email, etc., and then everything in my email, which will have the goods on hundreds of people/companies/etc. wow.

  18. Drew Olanoff

    October 8th, 2006 at 6:52 pm

    I’ll stick to wordpress, thank you.

  19. Mike McMan

    October 8th, 2006 at 7:05 pm

    The bug that was used to hack Google’s blog is not a Blogger specific bug, it is a bug in RSS and MetaWeblogAPI. All blogging platforms that support the two are vulnerable including Blogger (now fixed), Wordpress, and Typepad. Currently no details on how the bug works have been made public and there are no official patches for it.

  20. Ken

    October 8th, 2006 at 9:18 pm

    Just reading it you can tell it’s fake. Was it ‘hacked’ or was it a disgruntled employee. Better for Google to say it was hacked than done by someone one the inside who grew to hate their job.

  21. Domain

    October 8th, 2006 at 10:22 pm

    Sounds like a Chinese hacker who did not have a good command of english. He/she probably typed in the announcement in Chinese into the Google translator and simply copy and pasted the english translation (including the disclaimer) straight into what ever hacking program he used. . .

  22. Aibek Esengulov

    October 11th, 2006 at 4:28 am

    that is shame for google, if the blog is hosted on their servers…

  23. Aj

    February 19th, 2007 at 12:31 pm

    hey how do u post things on google please tell me

« Previous post
Next post »