Google sometimes does good deeds for the Internet community. They are using the wide reach of the Internet to inform Windows users of potential malware threats on their computer.
According to AFP, the malware warning was established after the company saw “some unusual search traffic” while doing simple maintenance on their data centers.
“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,'” said Google security engineer Damian Menscher in a July 19 post on the Google Security Blog.
“As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results,” he said.
The yellow “Your computer appears to be infected” message will show up at the top of Google’s search results if the Internet giant finds that a computer is hiding a certain kind of malware. The message will also come with a link that shows how to fix the problem and eliminate the infections.
“We hope to use the knowledge we’ve gathered to assist as many people as possible,” said Menscher.
However, comments posted on Google’s Security Blog advised that the warning could be more problematic to inexperienced computer users in the future than having no official warning at all.
“It’s too bad that the malware folks in the world already use ‘your computer appears to be infected’ messages to trick people into installing malicious software,” said a user who goes by the name of Mecandes. “Tomorrow, the bad guys will copy the format and appearance of Google’s version of the message, to leverage the trust people have in Google. Perhaps Google needs something akin to the Yahoo personalized ‘sign-in seal’ for moments like this?”
Those are some interesting suggestions to say the least.
A Security Threat Report in January from security company Sophos says that the USA has the most infected webpages in the world. France, Russia, Germany and China make up the other most infected countries.
