If you have been visiting this site over the last couple of weeks you may have noticed that Google has flagged it as being ‘unsafe’ and being ‘harmful to your computer!’
To cut a long story short, someone (possibly) hacked part of my part of my site and infected it with malware which caused Google to flag it as being unsafe.
If you use IE you might have got this warning:
If you were browing in Firefox you would have seen this hysterical warning:
It appeared to be a couple of archive pages from this year that were causing problems although you could be forgiven for thinking from the above warning that I was planning to blow up the entire Internet with help from Russian spammers and Al-Qaeda’s IT department.
The basic deal is that sites like mine can be compromised without owners knowing about it until you get flagged.
It’s a bit of Catch 22 – you don’t know there is a problem until it is pointed out to you and then it takes a while to a) figure out what is wrong, b) fix the problem and c) get Google to see if it is fixed.
For more information just visit www.stopbadware.org (especially this bit) which explains all of this in more detail.
In the meantime I’ve made a few technical changes to the backend of the site and tightened up the security which should mean that in a few days Google will unflag it.
[Photo via Flickr user Stefan]