[German]Google has been blocking the Computing Machinery (acm.org) website for several hours due to malware, triggering corresponding warnings in Chrome and Firefox browsers. Visitors can then only visit the pages at their own risk. I tracked it down – it looks to me like this is a false alarm on Google's part – because on Virustotal, the acm.org site is listed as clean. Here is a brief overview of this issue.
I came across the issue via the colleagues at Bleeping Computer and also the following tweet and took a closer look.
If I enter the term "Computing Machinery" in Google Chrome or Firefox, the page acm.org is found and also linked. Subsequent link results show that this is a reputational website.
In fact, according to Wikipedia, the Association for Computing Machinery was founded in 1947 as the first scientific society for computer science. The goal of the organization is to "advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology". To this end, it publishes various journals and publications and organizes conferences. And the site acm.org is their website.
But in above (German) search results, the warning is displayed that the page might contain malware. Attempting to access this page in Google search events is blocked in Google Chrome or Firefox with a clear malware warning.
It is said to be a dangerous website. Well, the website might have been compromised, of course. I therefore called up virustotal.com and entered the URL acm.org there. The following result appears.
he page is listed as clean – i.e. someone is lying, either Google with its smartscreen filter for browsers or Virustotal. Colleagues at Bleeping Computer report that security researcher Maximilian Golla first noticed the false alert. You can find his posts on Twitter.
The colleagues at Bleeping Computer then had acm.org checked for Google Safe Browsing – I did the same. No threat is detected. Seems to be a false alarm from Google.
