Google Search to Tell You Whether You’ve Got Your Malware On or Not

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Google Search is now so cool that it will be able to tell you whether your computer has any malware on it or not. And that’s a true story! Google announced it officially and you may experience that yellow-screen of death you see below on your computer in case you’ve been careless enough to grab your fair share of malware on your device.

Working with security engineers Google found some altered search traffic being sent by some computers out there. It turned out that those machines were infected and now Google has found a way to tell you whether your computer is in trouble or not. Here’s what happens with these particular searches affected by malware:

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 antivirus software and remove the infections.

Naturally it’s up to you to fix your computer, and as you can clearly see in the image above, Google’s notification points to a page that will tell you how to address the problem appropriately. Of course, this malware detection that Google Search will offer may not apply to all malware programs out there, and those malware programs that are currently affected by it, may be updated to circumvent it. But in the mean time this is certainly a great initiative from Google.

But instead of ending up relying on Google Search to keep you out of harm’s way you may want to take some preemptive actions such as buying an antivirus, updating it regularly, and, equally important, keeping away of shady websites, shady emails and instant messages as they can all point to some source with malicious intents.

Has anyone gotten that yellow malware notification from Google yet?