Google has flagged the Web sites of 10 Australian Football League (AFL) clubs as potentially dangerous, preventing visitors from accessing the teams' sites via the search engine.
A Google search for Australian football clubs such as the Sydney Swans and the St Kilda Saints leads to the words "This site may harm your computer" being displayed beneath the search result.
The warning: Click to enlarge.
Users who click on the AFL site link are diverted to a Google Help Center page about malicious software. Despite the warnings, there are no apparent security problems with the team sites.
In order to access the football sites -- which are all hosted by Telstra's BigPond -- would-be visitors must type the URL directly into their browser's address bar.
"That's the killer: you've got to cut and paste the link into the browser bar," said Roger Thompson, Chief Research Officer at AVG Technologies, who discovered the Google warning following a blocked attempt to access the St Kilda site. "Joe Average is not going to be bothered doing that."
The flagging is part of Google's measures to identify dangerous sites and prevent Web surfers from accessing malware-infested pages.
According to the FAQ page of Stopbadware.org -- an organisation that works with Google to test suspicious pages -- many sites flagged by the search engine have been victims of a hacking attack or have hosted third-party content that distributed malware.
"Probably at some stage [hackers] managed to hack into those sites, the common thread being AFL," said Thompson in a telephone interview.
"The slightly amusing thing is that they're all clean now and yet they're still being outed as bad."
A Google representative said the team sites were flagged as "compromised" on 20 February.
"We are continuing to monitor the infected sites and will remove the flag when our standard procedures indicate that they're safe," the spokesperson said.
"Any Webmaster who wants to seek a review of a warning attributed to their site can do so very easily at any time ... no request for review has been received at this time."
BigPond Group Manager of Corporate Affairs, Craig Middleton, explained the security issue in an e-mail: "The Google search service incorrectly identified a corrupted data file as 'malware' and automatically applied the erroneous warning to the club sites when accessed via Google search," he wrote.
"This is very regrettable because there was at no stage any threat or risk to users. The sites were neither 'infected' or 'compromised'. The file which caused this was removed last Friday morning. We hope few AFL fans were inconvenienced by this Google 'service'."
Of the 16 AFL club Web sites, 10 have been flagged as harmful, while the other six (Fremantle, West Coast, Adelaide, Collingwood, Essendon and the Western Bulldogs) are regarded by Google as clean.
There's a joke there...