Said the world was dangerous
Browser outfit
Google had an attack of paranoia over the weekend and listed most of the world's
sites as dangerous.
Millions of users were unable to access the sites they
were looking for, and instead received the warning: "This site may harm your
computer". The flaw lasted less than an hour but millions of dollars worth on
online transactions went tits up.
Google said on its website that the balls
up was human error. Its black list of dodgy sites was wrongly updated and all
sites were automatically blocked. Basically the URL of '/' was mistakenly
checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs.
On thing that
is interesting from a security point of view was that it showed how vulnerable
the Internet infrastructure was. If a terrorist or similar outfit really wanted
to do some damage to western businesses, all they would have to do is
concentrate on damaging Google.