Google Will Start Notifying Users with Malware

A couple of days ago Google announced that it will start notifying users of its search engines about possible infections of malware or trojans on their machines. Initially the effort will be focused on the DNSChanger trojan, but hopefully it will be extended to other malware.

DNSChanger is a Windows-based trojan which changes the registry containing the nameservers your computer uses to find websites. As a result you’ll type something on the browser and will be redirect to another website, possibly containing further malware.

In order to be notified about a possible infection all you need to do is to search on Google.com. Here’s how the warnings looks like:

If you are wondering why they don’t this more often, here’s why, according to a Google security engineer:

“In general we want to notify users [of malware infections] anytime we are capable of doing so, but the fact that we don’t do this more often is really just because it’s hard to come across cases where we can do it this accurately. In many cases we only have maybe a 90 percent confidence that someone is infected, and the false positive rate of 10 percent is simply too high to be feasible. But in this case we can be essentially certain that someone is infected.”

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