"This site may harm your computer" message on every Google search result was an error.
This past weekend on Saturday January 31st, Google tagged every search result as malware with a phrase you may have seen before "This site may harm your computer". The incident was a mistake of course blamed to be a human error. The situation is somewhat humorous but not to computer users who take those words seriously when they perform internet searches using Google. The "error" happened for about one hour on Saturday from 6:30am to 7:25am PST.
If you have visited malicious sites that spread malware and you were infected then a message that says "This site may harm your computer" could be a matter of your system getting a serious virus or you being able to check your bank account online. With all of the malware running around over the internet computer users are becoming more educated on ways to avoid getting infected.
Google has a list of bad URL's that they use to display their warning message when you do perform a Google search. Google has said that they worked with StopBadware.org to develop the list but this incident that happened Saturday was not related to StopBadware.org which actually suffered a DDOS attack as a result from this issue.
What does "This site may harm your computer" message really mean?
Simply put this message means that a particular site that you are about to enter has been flaged as possibly having malware or being a phishing site. Many times some of these flagged sites have been known to install malicious programs rogue anti-spyware applications or download virus or spyware files onto your computer. This is a convenient notification that Google offers on its search results.
Google has fixed the error, which was caused by a person, very quickly and they said users may have only been affected for about 40 minutes. Google even posted a notice on their blog further explaining the situation and that they apologize for the incident.
Do you ever pay attention to the "This site may harm your computer" message that you may get when performing a Google search? If you never did, will you pay attention to it now?