I was looking for some info on PHP session timouts, and scanning google for information on the gc_maxlifetime variable in PHP, when I came across some weirdness. Try this search: http://www.google.ca/search?q=1440+php+maxlifetime&btnG=Search&hl=en
If you see what I saw, you’ll get this:
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.
What’s going on here? All other queries work fine.
Update:
It seems to be caused when you use the second “search” box that shows up at the bottom of the page after you’ve searched for something else. Try searching for “test” or whatever, then entering “1440 php maxlifetime” into the bottom search box. Seems to be reproducible.
Updated update:
Over at kuro5hin.org, horny smurf is saying:
“it looks more like /\d*+php.*/ is the offending pattern.
http://www.google.com/search?q=0+phpie 403s, http://www.google.com/search?q=0+php+hot+naked+lesbian+chicks 403s, http://www.google.com/search?q=php+1440+maxlifetime works fine.”
That’s really strange. I can reproduce that one from your link directly, but I can’t manage to get it to come up if I try to enter it manually.
Here, take a look at this one…
I looked up the Santy worm at F-Secure, and they said that the worm executed a search for “viewtopic.php”– a phpbb file that was apparently vulnerable.
I popped it into google, and I get the same page:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=viewtopic.php&btnG=Search
Mike
Mike,
Thanks for the links, as I haven’t seen those before.
I can sorta understand why the results of a phpinfo() call would be considered sensitive, but I can’t imagine that google would have filtered out the (literally dozens of) keywords that might pull up a phpinfo page.
This seems a bit different – but you may be right, who knows!
Nathan
Hi… I stumbled in from pingomatic…
It seems like that search is likely to yield the phpinfo() file from a server. Give it a shot in MSN to see what I mean:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=1440+php+maxlifetime
I pulls up tons of phpinfo() files.
Seeing as there have been worms like Santy around lately, Google is probably tying to block access to files they would consider to be sensitive.
There’s a whole page about interesting search terms for google that you can find here: http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/index.php?module=prodreviews
It’s fascinating stuff…
Enjoy!
Mike