Google Is A Malware Site (Says Yahoo)
Michael Arrington
56 comments »
I’m going to assume that the fact that some Yahoo search results that point to Google with a malware warning are a sign that their new partnership with McAfee just needs a little tuning. The alternatives are either (1) Google is serving Malware, or (2) Yahoo or McAfee are playing a little joke.
Most results that point to Google don’t have this “feature,” and given the recent love fest between the two companies, the joke angle is probably out. Keep an eye out on this query though. I wouldn’t be surprised to see flags popping up all over the place on that page.
Last time I opened up google I got a virus.
Wow! This is great
Haha.. This is some joke though.
LOL
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!!!
hysterical!
@chris, wow, even funnier
That’s fairly embarrassing for Yahoo! What an amusing mistake.
Sounds interesting. I wonder what Google has to say about it?
Well maybe Yahoo is right! who knows..
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
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.
i just searched google on yahoo, it didnt show up
user error.
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.
Ballmer is gonna like that one
I don’t think Google would be too happy with this….although I doubt they will even comment.
From comment #11 and #13, it seems that it’s an unintentional bug in the program.
The link in question is a cached link for forums.astalavista.ms. Just a matter of technicalities.
what a *nice advertisement* for McAffee - I guess they need to work more before expect market to take them serious.
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
Very funny.
I guess its still in Beta! Lets try again in a months time.
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
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.
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?
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
I’m beginning to think that registered comments would serve TC well.
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…
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.
TechCrunch tried to publish a exclusive posts with exclusive but it’s fully wrong information. I don’t aspect that types of posts…
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.
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…
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
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
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.