What Is StopBadware.org?

Bewildered Google users frenetically posted inquiries on blogs and message boards wondering what to do when, for a brief window of time on Saturday morning, the search giant deemed every search result to contain malicious software and warned users that clicking on any one of them “could harm your computer.”

As it turned out, the issue was “human error,” as noted by Google exec Marissa Mayer on the official Google blog.

But Mayer updated her blog post after Maxim Weinstein, manager of the nonprofit malware watchdog organization, StopBadware.org, wrote on the group’s blog that Google (GOOG) had erroneously implied that its list of malware URLs comes directly from StopBadware, a claim that indirectly caused the nonprofit to take heavy flak for Google’s malware snafu. To clarify the relationship between the two, he wrote, Google partners with StopBadware to create the criteria that determine which sites make its malware list, but does not actually come up with specific sites that should be there.

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