Google: Your Computer Appears to Be Infected
Summary: Google began warning more than a million Internet users that their Windows PCs were infected with malware that hijacks search results and pushes fake antivirus software. Google security engineer Damian Menscher found the infected machines while doing routine maintenance, when a data center taken off-line was still receiving thousands of requests per second from hosts pinging a Google address to check whether they were online.
Key Takeaway: More than a million infected machines were routing traffic for google.com, yahoo.com and bing.com through attacker-controlled proxies that altered search results and redirected victims to pay-per-click schemes. Search hijackers are known for blocking users from reaching antivirus sites and malware removal tools, so the cleanup is the hard part.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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