There have been reports floating around the Internet that people have been getting blocked or having their IP addresses banned on Google. Reasons for getting blocked vary, but it appears that at least some of the blocks are false alarms, and Kaspersky Lab has confirmed this problem exists.

Kaspersky Lab has managed to reproduce the suspicious behaviour that can get a human user getting locked out of Google.

The problem exists for all possible connection types, static IP, dynamic IP or even when connecting through a proxy which is probably the worst situation. If the proxy gets blocked, all users connecting through that proxy are redirected to a captcha Google page.

“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,” said Magnus from Kasppersky Lab.

This type of Google blockout can occur if your computer is infected with any number of spyware programs, viruses or trojans, so it always pays to have up to date anti-virus/spyware and firewall software running.

Magnus said that Google was obviously trying to stop spammers.

“A lot of spammers use Google to find the emails of potential victims and automate this task by using little scripts which may be run from infected machines. So Google can implement a temporary block which is lifted when the user correctly responds to Google’s captcha by entering the letters and numbers shown, proving that s/he is not a spambot,” he said

As to what causes Google to see real human users as a “bot”, barring a spyware or virus infection, that has not been revealed. 

Kaspersky has notified Google of the problem but so far has not received a response.

Related:

Entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 8:59 am under Google, Internet, Security.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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