Google notifies users of malware infections with warning on search pages

Google has announced new features for its search pages designed to notify users that their computers may be infected with malware, as the search company continues to enhance the security of its web-based services.

Security engineer Damian Menscher, explained in a blog post that Google set up the new system after discovering some "unusual search traffic" while performing routine datacentre maintenance.

"After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behaviour were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or malware," he said.

"This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called 'proxies'.

"We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their anti-virus software and remove the infections."

Computer users who appear to have traffic coming via these proxies, and try to search via Google, will see a warning at the top of the page which reads: 'Your computer appears to be infected.'

Menscher added that users can also run a system scan on their machines if they are concerned about malware by following the steps on the Help Center page.