The search engine giant Google is currently suffering from what appears to be a self-inflicted denial of service. Every search page is returning a mention that the link may be harmful to your system. The mention refers you to a Google page which should explain why, but attempts to get to that page fail with a server timeout…presumably because millions of people are trying the same thing.

The warning appears to come from Stopbadware.org. That domain was registered by Google, and the DNS administrator’s phone number leads you to the Harvard School of Law. Presumably this is an organization attempting to assist in the control of criminals using search engine results to seed crimeware.

The problem appears to have started sometime in the morning on January 31^st, EST.

Update 10:30am

The problem first appeared to us at approximately 9:30am, and as of 10:30am, appears to be resolved. At least the warnings are no longer appearing.

Update 10:45am

Further checking reveals that Google is properly warning against search results that do appear to contain crimeware, so everything appears to be functioning as it should right now.

Tags: DoS, Google, Search Engine

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.