Browser outfit Google had an attack of paranoia over the weekend and listed most of the world's sites as dangerous.

Millions of users were unable to access the sites they were looking for, and instead received the warning: "This site may harm your computer". The flaw lasted less than an hour but millions of dollars worth on online transactions went tits up.

Google said on its website that the balls up was human error.  Its black list of dodgy sites was  wrongly updated and all sites were automatically blocked. Basically the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs.

On thing that is interesting from a security point of view was that it showed how vulnerable the Internet infrastructure was.  If a terrorist or similar outfit really wanted to do some damage to western businesses, all they would have to do is concentrate on damaging Google.