Google moves to stamp out online malware threat

by Steven Mostyn - Jul 22 2011, 07:48

Search giant Google has this week moved to use its considerable online presence to help prevent potentially damaging malware from being accessed by its unwitting customer base.

“Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers,” outlined Google in an official blog post.

“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 or ‘malware’”.

Google has said the malware in question causes infected systems to dispatch traffic through a small number of intermediary servers known as ‘proxies’. And, as a result of the discovery, Google has begun issuing the following on-screen warning to targeted users via their search results page:

“Your computer appears to be infected. It appears that your computer is infected with software that intercepts your connection to Google and other sites. [Click here to] Learn how to fix this.”

In order to quash an existing malware intrusion and/or protect against possible attack, Google has said users need to react to the warning by updating and unleashing their chosen antivirus software platform.
 
The California search specialist has further explained that the malware attacks span “a couple million machines” and have emanated from an unspecified fake antivirus software package presently circulating around the Net.

Around the Web