As of right now, it appears any google search you do will come up with all the same results as before.  What has changed is that it appears to be reporting that every site might contain malware (i.e. it shows the "This site may harm your computer" warning with every result).  Apparently it has been happening for about the last 15 minutes.  So things are going a little haywire there and I'm sure it'll be fixed shortly.  Bottom line, there is no massive web-based attack going on.

The interesting backstory to this is that I discovered this problem with Twitter. Specifically, I use TweetDeck and noticed that all the sudden "harm", "malware", "harmful" and "google" just jumped to the top of the trending list. I took a look and found out about the problem and confirmed it for myself.  I'm still somewhat skeptical of using Twitter trends to get hard-core intelligence about what is going on around you, but it certainly does point out some things to look at, even for information security professionals.

UPDATE X1: It appears international versions of Google search are also impacted.

UPDATE X2: It appears that the problem has since been fixed.

UPDATE X3: Google's reponse: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html

(Weekend humor: I had thought about this after this was written, but a better title of this diary would have been "Whitelisting: You're Doing it Wrong")

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John Bambenek, bambenek /at/ gmail \dot\ com