MalwareBytes: All Google And YouTube Services Detected As malware

If the virus scanner completely classifies the offers of one of the largest Internet companies in the world as malware, the users have a problem. You are then flooded with warning messages almost every time you visit the website and can hardly work properly. This is what happened with the Malwarebytes virus scanner. This had incorrectly sorted Google’s services after a software update.

As a result, users of the software were unable to access either the search engine or the YouTube video platform. But various other services that can be reached under a subdomain – such as Google Maps or Google News – have also been reported to be an inaccessible bleeding computer. But that’s not all. Numerous websites integrate different Google services into their code – even if it’s just the tracking pixel for the Google Analytics statistics tool.

Not forgetting, of course, the advertisements that are delivered via the group’s AdSense network. There are only relatively few websites on which Google plays no role at all – and accordingly, users were frequently confronted with warning messages or blockages from their virus scanner.

A Quick Workaround

“We are aware that there is a temporary issue with the web filtering component of our product that may be blocking certain domains, including http://google.com,” Malwarebytes said in an initial statement. As a workaround, it was recommended to disable web protection in the virus scanner settings under real-time protection.

A short time after the first complaints from users surfaced, the manufacturer was able to present a more extensive solution. An update of the software was immediately pushed in, which should install itself. In this, the underlying error was fixed.