Does anyone else get the following “403 Forbidden” error when following this link?
We’re sorry…
… but we can’t process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.
We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.
It only appears for me if I use exactly those parameters in that order, including both the ie and oe parameters. A search from the main Google page now doesn’t add those two.
Anyone know what’s going on?
It appears for me too…
Yep.
Though that happened last time. Might be something as simple as they updated their 403 error page to display that message, and forgot to change it back to a plain old 403. I wouldn’t validate that message just yet. No popular media seems to be reporting the attack. Considering how high-profile google is, I’d think they would jump on it.
I get the message.
It’s obviously hard coded to catch some malware and appears to be triggered by the string “mail.” if specific variables are set in the request.
hl=en: Required English, doesn’t work for es, fr etc
ie=UTF-8:
oe=UTF-8: input/output encoding must be set to UTF-8 (uppercase only)
q=anything: a search string is required
This works:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=anything&mail.
That’s probably left over from when Google got inadvertently attacked by a virus which used Google to find email addresses at certain domains.
Yea I get it when I follow your link. Hmm.. I guess they’ll get on it soon.
prosco. it doesn’t work (atleast now)
Yeah, there was a virus going around a while back that searched Google for email addresses containing specific strings. I would bet that parameter set matches the profile of that virus’ requests.