It looks like the website of American technology pundit John C Dvorak has suffered some security problems.
Anyone Googling for Dvorak’s blog would find themselves treated to a malware warning like the following:
Unfortunately, John C Dvorak seems to believe more in conspiracy than cockup, and claimed that the search giant was deliberately mislabelling his website in anger at his negative opinions of the company.
Uh-oh, it looks like he’s shooting the messenger rather than checking his facts.
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, was quick to jump in and (rather politely I thought, all things considered) set the record straight:
In a blog post Matt Cutts went into further detail about the infection (the malware is spread via a malicious iFrame).
If you’ve visited John C Dvorak’s website recently, I would recommend you scan your computer with an up-to-date anti-virus just to be on the safe side.
Actually, you should probably run an up-to-date anti-virus all of the time. Many thousands of legitimate websites are found every day that have been compromised by malicious hackers and used to spread infections to unsuspecting users.
Remember to keep your web server software up-to-date, and follow best practices to secure your systems and minimise the chances of infection. After all, the last thing you want is to infect the computers of your precious web visitors.
The good news is that Dvorak’s webmasters have probably fixed the problem by now, and can submit a request to Google to rescan the site and reclassify it (thus removing it from their warning list).
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the underlying problem which caused the infection in the first place has gone away… so always be sure to protect your own computers rather than rely on webmasters.
