(Cross-posted on the Google Online Security Blog)
The Internet brings remarkable benefits to society. Unfortunately, some people use it for harm and their own gain at the expense of others. They believe in the power of the web and information, and they work every day to detect potential abuse of our services and ward off attacks.
As they work to protect our users and their information, they sometimes discover unusual patterns of activity. Recently, they found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, they determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware.” As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results:
This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called “proxies.” They hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, they can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.
They hope to use the knowledge they’ve gathered to assist as many people as possible. In case our notice doesn’t reach everyone directly, you can run a system scan on your computer yourself by following the steps in their Help Center article.