Google Is A Malware Site (Says Yahoo)

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1. Wes Mahler
   

   May 11th, 2008 at 11:50 pm

   Last time I opened up google I got a virus.

2. Zoul
   

   May 11th, 2008 at 11:51 pm

   Wow! This is great

3. Saravanan Sahadevan
   

   May 11th, 2008 at 11:52 pm

   Haha.. This is some joke though.

4. YDRIVE
   

   May 11th, 2008 at 11:56 pm

   LOL

5. Chris
   

   May 11th, 2008 at 11:57 pm

   Well, I think yahoo is half-way right… not sure how google lets this kind of easter eggs / trapps happen!

   Go to google, type “things I did last night” and click “I’m feeling lucky”

   Pretty silly, but come on GOOGLE!!!

6. steve
   

   May 12th, 2008 at 12:01 am

   hysterical!

   @chris, wow, even funnier

7. Louis Gray
   

   May 12th, 2008 at 12:03 am

   That’s fairly embarrassing for Yahoo! What an amusing mistake.

8. Rushabh Choksi
   

   May 12th, 2008 at 12:08 am

   Sounds interesting. I wonder what Google has to say about it?

9. Anand
   

   May 12th, 2008 at 12:12 am

   Well maybe Yahoo is right! who knows..

10. Smart PC Solutions
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 12:14 am

    I think this is an obvious case of unfair competition by McAfee. I wrote about my experience with the unfair ratings - Want to know how McAfee “SiteAdvisor” makes money on you? See if you are one of the targets: http://www.smartpctools.com/truth

11. Jono
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 12:17 am

    It’s a bug.

    The search term in question is “Astalavista”. If you click the more info link, McAfee refers you to information about astalavista.ms not Google.

12. RIAA
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 12:41 am

    i just searched google on yahoo, it didnt show up

    user error.

13. Colin C.
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 12:48 am

    There seems to be an issue with their McAfee association. I clicked on the More Details link that is listed in the McAfee warning and it shows astalavista.ms as the bad site. Not Google.com.

14. Bashar
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 12:59 am

    Ballmer is gonna like that one

15. Anthony Feint
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 1:07 am

    I don’t think Google would be too happy with this….although I doubt they will even comment.

16. Freiddie
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 1:08 am

    From comment #11 and #13, it seems that it’s an unintentional bug in the program.

17. Nan
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 1:16 am

    The link in question is a cached link for forums.astalavista.ms. Just a matter of technicalities.

18. A.T.
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 1:18 am

    what a *nice advertisement* for McAffee - I guess they need to work more before expect market to take them serious.

19. Nicholas Francis
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 1:49 am

    is this somekind of joke by Yahoo and McAfee. ha ha ha..I google everyday… i dont get any viruses… I think yahoo is trying to ruin googles reputation…which will never possible

20. Spuds
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 1:57 am

    Very funny.

21. John
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 2:56 am

    I guess its still in Beta! Lets try again in a months time.

22. Amit Bhawani
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 3:50 am

    This is a wrong report if you study the Yahoo search results in detail @ http://www.amitbhawani.com/blo.....h-reports/ May be you can make a report with more observation since the site which is referred is astalavista.ms and not Google.com

23. Corey O'Donnell
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 7:52 am

    Google basically indexes the entire web, so of course the results often link to malware-hosting sites and downloads. No doubt Yahoo! has been white-listed by McAfee not to prompt this alert, but you could argue that having the warning is more appropriate than not having it on any search engine.

24. JerkCrunch
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 8:37 am

    A new low for Arrington!

    Is this news?
    Where is the startup being covered?

    Why is it that we never see M$ in news like this?

    You couldn’t let go attacking google and yahoo in one single headline, could you?

25. deb
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 9:00 am

    this is a foolish posting is this blog..Michael Arrington please do a little research then do a post. http://www.amitbhawani.com/blo…..h-reports/
    see this link and apologize for this wrong post

26. Jay Cuthrell
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 9:20 am

    I’m beginning to think that registered comments would serve TC well.

27. zol
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Deb: Nothing foolish, it’s clearly a bug from Yahoo / McAfee integration.
    1- Yahoo shoudn’t return http://www.google.com as a result of searching astalavista
    2- The ranking insertion is wrong too
    3- The result is really funny

    It’s bug and it seems they already fixed it but google.com is still in the results…

28. Brent
    

    May 12th, 2008 at 6:59 pm

    Wrong:
    Stopbadware.org and Google partner to compete in the malware arena under the pretense of a charitable org headed by vint cerf.

    This site may harm your computer.

    The result:
    Millions of site owners with dangerous labels attached to their search results. Ten people are saved bard drive crashes. (got better numbers?)

    The karma:
    When it happens to the people that hurt so many. Stopbadware.org is evil.

29. sam
    

    May 13th, 2008 at 1:46 am

    TechCrunch tried to publish a exclusive posts with exclusive but it’s fully wrong information. I don’t aspect that types of posts…

30. V
    

    May 13th, 2008 at 2:41 am

    This result might be because many search terms in Google lead to dangerous/harmful websites. Maybe McAfee searches and reports back very deep.

    Anyways this bug looks weird and for google.com its already fixed.

31. Ronak Bhagdev
    

    May 13th, 2008 at 4:58 am

    check this query (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Astalavista) again, you will get diffrent result.

    Yahoo has repaired it!!?

    Yahoo… really big mistake. So sad…

32. Pat Marcello
    

    May 13th, 2008 at 5:59 am

    Yeah… I work with a site about attention deficit disorder, and no matter what we tried, we couldn’t get the McAfee Red X to come off. (See post http://ovblogger.com/2008/01/0.....fee-red-x/)

    This isn’t a spam site. It’s an information site, but we made the mistake of using HyperTracker for tracking purposes. We got zapped.

    If I were HyperTracker, I’d be yelling “lawsuit” all over the place.

    –Pat

33. David Lewis
    

    May 13th, 2008 at 7:45 am

    It wasn’t that big a mistake by Yahoo. Google was called a malware provider on a search term that received little traffic until yesterday.

    My site has been targeted by Yahoo as a spammer. We do not SPAM. The only other site that I can find in Yahoo that is called a spammer is Excite.

    If the warning weren’t bad enough, Yahoo has terminated us from Paid Inclusion and removed most of our Paid Search campaigns. Yahoo’s reply? 3 different departments claim that Yahoo is not responsible. This after 5 years of advertising (not ot mention that I was in the BD group at GoTo / Overture). No answer yet from McAfee.

    I can’t get a trackback for some reason. You can read teh details and see Yahoo’s e-mail at http://www.revenews.com/davidl.....ays-yahoo/

    -David

34. Ignacio
    

    May 16th, 2008 at 9:21 pm

    Hi,

    any automatic tool that searches for malicious sites could tag Google as a source of malware or related to spam because the flaws existing in the iclk script that Google uses for their AdSense program.

    iclk allows to make redirections to sites without checking them. Just try the following link, that will lead you back to this post, going through Google site:

    http://pagead2.googlesyndicati.....7&nm=4

    That script can also be used for redirecting to executables files hosted at exploited web sites (already seen in-the-wild).

    If an automated tool catches any of those links over the web, it could tag Google as malicious. It’s not the fault of the tool, it’s something that Google should correct but they don’t.

    Regards.