"Server certificate does not match URL" for www.google.com?

Stevohen

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Sep 15, 2010
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This morning I opened Chrome and noticed something strange - if I do a google search (from address bar) or try to access gmail or even manually try to access www.google.com, Chrome gives the following security error (Internet Explorer gives a similar error) :

This is probably not the site you are looking for!
You attempted to reach www.google.co.za, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as *.googlevideo.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of www.google.co.za.
You cannot proceed because the website operator has requested heightened security for this domain.


Any other website loads fine.

My first thought was that it's some kind of malware, so I reverted some tinkering I did in Avast, but to no avail. I did some googling, and tried a few malware removal tools and restarted, but the problem stayed. Read somewhere that a dnsflush should sort it out, but the error stayed.

The funny thing is that if I go to www.googlevideo.com, it redirects me to www.google.com/videohp and from there I can use google, although clicking on gmail still gives the error.

In the meantime I've given up and set Chrome to search using Yahoo by default, but I really need my google. Any thoughts?
 
Last edited:
make sure the url is using HTTPS and if using a proxy try without using a proxied connection. It sounds like an certificate issue that could be a result of a proxy stripping the encryption from your secure connections.
 
I started receiving this error too.

I had a bunch of google services added to my hosts file to force google to use local servers. This was a fix on mybb a couple of months back to force google and youtube to use local servers as some ISP dns servers weren't returning local servers.

On removing this, the error went away.
 
I started receiving this error too.

I had a bunch of google services added to my hosts file to force google to use local servers. This was a fix on mybb a couple of months back to force google and youtube to use local servers as some ISP dns servers weren't returning local servers.

On removing this, the error went away.

Thanks, that solved it!

I remember toying with something like that about a year ago... live and learn
 
I started receiving this error too.

I had a bunch of google services added to my hosts file to force google to use local servers. This was a fix on mybb a couple of months back to force google and youtube to use local servers as some ISP dns servers weren't returning local servers.

On removing this, the error went away.

Thanks man! That worked.
 
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