Web Security News

Google News crashes, was Google hacked?

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Something went wrong with Google News on Thursday morning, causing the website to go down for several hours. Google acknowledged the outage in a statement on Thursday.

"Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users from approximately 3:30 a.m. until around 7 a.m. Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved," the company said, according to CNET News.

"We know how important Google News is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously," Google said. "We apologize to those users who were affected."

The company did not divulge details of what went wrong, which meant IT blogs and web users were speculating about how the mighty Google could have been hacked.

The Google News site was down Thursday morning for users in Boston, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Texas and Sarasota, Florida, but worked for one user in London, CNET News reported.

On Twitter, a steady stream of users reported not being able to access other Google services, including the search engine, Gmail and Blogger.

Last week, hackers temporarily seized control of the domain name for Google Morocco. A hacker or group of hackers calling themselves PAKbugs posted graffiti on the site.

TechCrunch reported that the hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and targeted the Google domain name especially.
ADNFCR-1765-ID-19170544-ADNFCR

Related News:

Mac OS X malware game Lose-Lose deletes files - 11.5.2009
A graduate student has written a game for Mac OS X that resembles the classic video game Space Invaders, but Mac users should not download the game if they don't want to have it randomly delete files.

Adobe issues critical security update for Shockwave Player - 11.5.2009
Adobe Systems yesterday released a critical update for all versions of Shockwave Player and recommends that users upgrade to version 11.5.2.602 to protect against cyber attacks exploiting the vulnerability.

Microsoft Security Essentials detects malware that kills Windows XP - 11.5.2009
A new Trojan malware detected by Microsoft Security Essentials as Win32/Daonol steals credential information and redirects web traffic, Microsoft said on its malware protection blog.

FBI warns of malware targeting corporate bank accounts - 11.4.2009
A new report from the FBI cyber crime division said hackers have attempted theft of $100 million from online bank accounts, using sophisticated malware that steals bank account passwords.

Microsoft issues Internet Explorer security update - 11.3.2009
Microsoft on Monday issued a security bulletin that updates a previous patch for Internet Explorer to resolve two issues. The IE bug only affects users who already applied the earlier patch.

View Related Resources
Or
Watch an Online Demo
Or
Have us call you now