Google warns of massive malware outbreak

Google Inc. has detected a “large number” of Windows-based computers infected with a specific type of malicious software, and the company behind the world’s largest search engine is warning Web users they might be affected.

“This is important,” Matt Cutts, the software engineer who leads the company’s Webspam team, wrote in a post on Tuesday night.

“If you go to Google and do a search (any word will do) right now, check to see whether you get a “Your computer appears to be infected” warning at the top of the search results,” he said in comments last edited at 8:22 p.m. ET.

“If you see the message, you need to clean up the infection from your machine.”

Google security engineer Damian Menscher explained in a post to the Google blog this particular type of malware causes infected computers to reroute traffic sent to the Google homepage through a small group of intermediary or “proxy” servers.

The widespread infection was recently discovered during a routine maintenance check and confirmed by security engineers at several companies, he said.

Currently it appears as though only the Windows platform is affected by the malware.

Google did not speculate on the scale of the infection or why modified data was being transmitted to the search engine in the first place.

By issuing a public notice, Mr. Cutts said Google is trying “an experiment to alert and protect consumers” in hopes of containing the outbreak.

“Remember to do an actual search (any search will do) and check the top of the search results page; don’t just go to the home page,” Mr. Cutts stressed.

“Please share this widely.”