Google said late Tuesday that it will use its search engine to respond to an outbreak of malicious software, or malware, that the company recently uncovered, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Writing on Google's blog, Damian Menscher, a security engineer, said the company discovered "unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers."
After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending the data traffic, he said, Google concluded that the computers associated with the traffic were infected with a particular strain of malware.
The malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called "proxies," Menscher wrote. Google plans to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies to help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections, he said.
Starting Tuesday, Menscher said, some people will see a prominent notification stating that "your computer appears to be infected" at the top of their Google web-search results. The notification includes a link to help people "learn how to fix this" by running a system scan of their computer, updating their antivirus software and removing the infections, he wrote.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
