Google warns users of data-stealing malware

Jan Vermeulen

Jan Vermeulen is a technology journalist and web developer at MyBroadband. After receiving a Computer Engineering degree at the University of Pretoria he worked at...

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In a post published earlier today on the official Google blog, Google security engineer Damien Menscher wrote that the search giant had detected a number of computers infected with malware communicating with Google’s servers.

Menscher explained that they discovered strange patterns of activity and collaborated with security engineers at several companies that were sending the modified traffic to determine the cause.

It turned out that the computers in question were infected with malicious software, or malware, that makes a PC send traffic to Google through a small number of proxies – servers that sit between you and Google.

Now able to detect when your traffic is coming from one of those proxies, Google warns users that they are potentially infected if it sees your requests coming from those servers.

Users have to search for something in order to see the warning.

Google traffic interception malware warning

Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, posted on Google+ that the malware is specific to Windows.

Tags: Active, google, malware