Google has just announced something pretty interesting, that it is using its
own data to detect viruses and will as of today be using the Google Search home
page to warn users if their computers are infected with a specific form of
malware. Users infected with the virus, which is apparently rerouting traffic
to Google and other sites through a proxy, will see the above warning.
>From the Google blog post curiously titled “Using data to protect people from
>malware”:
“Recently, we 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, we
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.”
Google’s Matt Cutts offers more details about the virus on his Twitter account,
apparently it only affects Windows computers and hijacks Google results.
“That’s how we learned about it,” Cutts says about the results hacking thing,
without offering many more details.
While I’m not sure how often Google does this, this is the first time that I
can recall a major search engine turning its homepage into what is ostensibly a
malware alarm. Of course this is in the search engine’s best interests; if
proxies are intercepting communications they could also potentially access
Google accounts, thus creating more headaches for Google.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-a346BOz56U/
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