Intellectual Property Law

Quite a Saturday morning at StopBadware

By palfrey

This morning, it seems that many (all?) Google search results led to a warning page meant to be associated with sites that have malware on them.  We at StopBadware are partners with Google, among others, working hard to fight malicious code together: we keep a clearinghouse of sites that may harm one’s computer and we run a review process to get sites off that list when they are clean.  There have been a series of blog posts about this strange, short occurence this morning which include misinformation about what happened.  Nothing like it has happened in the first three years or so of the StopBadware project’s existence.  A few minutes after this large number of warnings appeared, the StopBadware server crashed under the load of people looking for more information about what had taken place.  Everything seems back to normal now. 

Here is the official Google statement about what happened.

Full post as published by John Palfrey on January 31, 2009 (boomark / email).