INSECURITY FIRM Kaspersky has confirmed that Google can "lock out" users due to "suspicious" search queries, as one of the firms' customers started getting the same error message that we reported earlier this week.
Of course, not everyone was as helpful and as understanding as Kaspersky. One particularly nasty missive from one of our readers was "there really isn't any excuse for that abortion of an article, even given the usual Inquirer encouragement gratuitously inflammatory half-truths." It continued: "I can see relatively obvious counterpoints to each of your screeching, hysterical complaints (which end, naturally, with your explaining how the entire rumpus amounts to a captcha test on a likely bot search), I can only conclude that some deep-seated psychological problem is responsible for your random-walk style diatribe."
Hopefully, most of our readers are of the "sane" kind. And among them was Magnus Kalkuhl, Virus analyst at Kaspersky Labs, makers of the popular namesake Anti-Virus product. Magnus wrote: "Good news: you're human (probably)!" and included a link to one of the company's weblog entries which details the same "Google Block" incident, this time affecting a whole firm which browses the Interweb through a company-wide proxy: "Today one of our clients got caught the same way – the ubiquitous search engine was displaying the same error message to lots of the company's staff" reads the blog entry.
"We've managed to reproduce the suspicious behaviour that can get a human user getting locked out of Google. And once the user's been locked out, his/ her IP address gets blacklisted. This can be a problem if the user is coming in via a proxy server – it will be the proxy that will be seen as the attacker, and the proxy that gets blocked. Which means that all the users coming in via the same proxy will also be subject to the same restrictions, until someone correctly solves the captcha." Kaspersky's analysis left out other possible scenario: broadband ISPs where the IP addresses changes periodically -my ISP for one is known to "renew" IP leases every few hours. So in the event I didn't answer Google's captcha, someone else getting my previous IP address might find himself lectured by Google on a "possible infection."
Kaspersky's document makes this clearer: "It would of course be helpful if the Google warning clearly stated that it could be the proxy, rather than the user's computer, which is suspected of being a bot". The firms concludes by saying that they have contacted Google about the issue, and is expecting a reply: "We've suggested this to Google, and we'll let you know their response."
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