Sophos mistakenly blocks Google analytics

Computer security firm Sophos on Friday admitted making a mistake when it blocked web content at Google Analytics after wrongly identifying it as malware. Sophos tagged the incident as a false positive, even as its senior technology consultant Graham Cluley admitted the incident affected some Sophos customers. "It's never fun to admit when you've made a mistake, but we made one earlier today. What's worse is that it affected some of our customers," Cluley wrote in a blog post Friday evening, Manila time. He said that at about 5:15 GMT (1:15 p.m. in Manila), Sophos's automatic systems mistakenly blocked web content at google-analytics.com," misidentifying it as Mal/HTMLGen-A." As a result, Sophos Live Protection would report Mal/HTMLGen-A when visiting webpages which reference google-analytics.com. Similarly, the Sophos web appliance would block the download of Google Analytics content. "Consequently, Sophos customers could receive incorrect reports about google-analytics.com," he said. Affected Sophos customers may see an alert claiming a "High risk website" had been blocked, "as 'Mal/HTMLGen-A' has been found at this website." Less than an hour later, Sophos had identified and rectified the problem, Cluley said. "This fix is currently propagating through our systems - no change is required on customers' computers. However, it may be that some customers are still experiencing the erroneous warning messages about google-analytics.com. This is something which we hope will be resolved shortly," he said. "We would like to apologies for any inconvenience caused by this false positive, and reassure customers that an investigation is taking place and steps have already been taken to prevent it from happening again. Even though no other web content was blocked, and it should not have impacted normal browsing by users, we recognize that the warning message can be disruptive," he said. - GMA News