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Google blocks Go Daddy for ‘hosting malware’

Kevin Murphy, May 30, 2010, 17:41:32 (UTC), Domain Registrars

(UPDATED) Google is currently blocking Go Daddy’s web site, calling it dangerous, because one of its image-hosting domains has been flagged for hosting malware.
Chrome users visiting pages on godaddy.com, including its storefront, currently see the standard Google alert page: “Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer!”
Go Daddy’s main page seems to be affected because it uses images hosted at img5.wsimg.com, a Go Daddy domain.
A bit of a poke around reveals that the whole of wsimg.com is currently considered a malware site by Google’s toolbar on non-Chrome browsers, and also by the Google search engine.
The question is, of course, whether this is a simple false positive or whether bad guys have somehow managed to inject malware onto Go Daddy’s servers.
Go Daddy’s web site takes revenue in the six figures every hour, so if this is a false positive I can only imagine the content of the phone calls between Scottsdale and Mountain View right now.
But Go Daddy has been a target for the bad guys in recent weeks, with attacks against its hosting customers proving an irritant that the company can’t seem to shake off.
The company was also the victim of a phishing attack yesterday. I’d be surprised if the two incidents are connected.
UPDATE: Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s chief operating officer, just called to say that this was indeed a false positive.
“Google erroneously flagged some of our image servers,” he said. “We need to go into this with Google, but there wasn’t any malware on our end.”
Adelman said Go Daddy has a pretty good idea what happened, but that it proved hard to get hold of the relevant people at Google on a Sunday morning during Memorial Day weekend.
Further details may be forthcoming later this week. For now, Google has apparently unflagged the servers in question, and Adelman expects the situation to be resolved within the hour.



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Comments (6)

  1. Michele says:

    Google’s malware detection is far from perfect.
    It’s “ok” at flagging sites, but seems to be really bad at removing the flag when the issue (if there even was one) has been dealt with
    While a company like GoDaddy might have the clout to get a fast resolution thousands of other companies simply don’t

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  5. minona says:

    Maybe GoDaddy didn’t hosted malware but I’m 100% sure that some of their clients (registered domains) host malware, phishing and other similar cyber crimes.
    Yea, sure, nothing is perfect, why should informio.biz be.

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