Malwarebytes blocks Google, YouTube as malware Google and its Youtube domains are being flagged as malicious by Malwarebytes as of Wednesday morning, blocking users from accessing a whole range of websites. We had assumed this was an error and not a protest by the antivirus maker against Big Tech nor a sign that Google has been compromised. Indeed, it is a blunder by …
At least one of The Register's own vultures was hit by this issue and locked out of email and all other Google services.
Really? An El Reg hack1 using Gmail?!? Shame!
I'd have figured a top-notch techie outfit like yourselves would have gone fill-metal Hillary by now and put up your own email server under the theregister.com (or perhaps theregister.co.uk) domain.
1 In the newspaper sense...
I was especially annoyed because my UK bank (Natwest) very strongly suggested I install Malwarebytes Premium and gave me a coupon code to get a free licence until at least May 2024. Today I was OK because I made a VNC connection into my headless Raspberry Pi 4 and used the Firefox on there.
And wondering if it also took down SSO, blocking access to several other annoying software packages we use. I have a coworker who is yelling at the walls while trying to perform a user migration to a new laptop. Took most of the afternoon for the removal command to sync down from the cloud.
"This morning, you may have experienced an issue with the real-time web filtering component of our product blocking certain domains, including google.com. In addition, the Nebula console itself may have experienced slowdowns, as it was dealing with a high volume of alert traffic from the web filter.
Once alerted to the problem, our product team resolved the issue and released an update to our web protection database (version 1.0.60360).
This update is applied during the normal update process and the issue should automatically resolve. In some cases, updating to the latest database may require temporarily disabling the web filtering feature.
Why did this happen? This morning, during a routine update, an error was introduced into the Malwarebytes web filtering database which caused various domains to be inadvertently blocked. We are performing an exhaustive analysis of our process to ensure an issue of this type does not affect our customers again, and we will be putting in place new procedures as a result.
I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you and your organization and remain committed to the highest standards of product quality and technical excellence.
Sincerely,
Marcin Kleczynski
CEO, Co-founder
Malwarebytes"
The adverts though; well I'd be inclined to treat all advertising as malware, in the sense that it's unwanted and steals your time. Given that google's principle business model is flogging advertising and finding ever more intrusive ways to force it into our eyeballs, I'd say fair game. The same goes for youtube which seems to have got to the point where a ten second video has 30 seconds of loud unskippable ads in front of it.
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