If you’re a Richmond, Virginia local, you’ve probably visited the Style Weekly web site [click at your own risk]. I Googled “style weekly” tonight and noticed in the search results a message that reads, “This site may harm your computer.” (shown below)
I clicked on the search result anyway, and I got the following message:
I’ve never seen this behavior from a Google search result before. Has anyone else?
Certainly, this isn’t good for Style Weekly. Not only does Google warn against going to the site, they post an interstitial page that doesn’t include a link to continue to the web site.
June 30th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Brenda P says:
I very recently went to Style Weekly and indeed, my virus protection went whacky about some trojan it nuked — I couldn’t find much information online on what exactly the trojan aims to do. Good for Google for trying to protect folks from entering a site that’s been tampered. But bad for Style Weekly, and for anyone who’s been there — folks, if you’ve been to Style, update your virus protection post haste and run a full virus-scan. (Oh, and I won’t go back to Style’s webpage until I read in a hardcopy version or in the RTD or something that they’ve cleaned their web parasites out.)
July 1st, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Tripp Fenderson says:
It’s not uncommon for Google to place that message between their search results and a site suspected of delivering malware.
A number of conditions can trigger the advisory including:
* Compromised web servers
* Poorly coded ActiveX controls or JavaScript (a possible culprit in Style’s case)
* Delivery of advertising content from compromised ad servers (the most likely culprit in Style’s case)
If you’re interested in reading more about Google’s methodology for deeming pages as compromised, take a look at this PDF:
http://www.usenix.org/events/hotbots07/tech/full_papers/provos/provos.pdf
October 1st, 2007 at 3:56 pm
J kellams says:
You need to up date your information The Google no longer list the message you are listing.
October 1st, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Rick Whittington says:
You are correct — this message doesn’t appear now. Thanks for fixing it!