Google has announced that it will start alerting users if their computers are infected with a malware. The search engine giant will use its traffic monitoring to spot problems.
Starting today, the company will warn users if their computers are infected via its Google Search results pages. The infected computers, which rerouts traffic to Google and other websites via a proxy will see a yellow warning that reads: “Your computer appears to be infected. If appears that your computer is infected with software that intercepts your connection to Google and other sites.”
“Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers,” said Damian Menscher, Google’s security engineer. “After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software.”
The said malware has already infected an unknown number of users, but it was enough for the company to launch a notification at the top of the results page to computers they believe to be infected.
“This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called ‘proxies.’ We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.”
The company’s Help Center offers tips on scanning your systems and how to remove malware infections. Malwares are designed to gather information about the user ad disrupt computer operations.
via: PC Pro
