MONTREAL - A team of five Montreal-based Google employees spends its days seeking out and battling malicious websites that could easily infect your computer.
And even good sites can suddenly turn bad.
“Even if you've been there yesterday or the day before and nothing seems to have happened, that site could have been infected since and may be very dangerous now,” said Google Software Developer Fabrice Jaubert.
The danger lies in the site’s ability to colonize your computer and use it for nefarious purposes.
Once infected, “your machine is now remotely-controlled by an adversary who has an army of machines at his control and can send out spam,” he said.
They can also steal your credit card numbers, passwords and other personal information.
The Google team is constantly hard at work battling those sites, which they discover at the rate of about 10,000 per day.
The team was created five year ago and tirelessly slays the virtual computers, starting the battle by slapping a warning on sites to prevent users from going further.
Their method of locating the sites is relatively straightforward.
“We'll send them to visit a website and then we'll observe the machine and if we see that it shows signs of having been infected, then we know that that site is distributing a virus,” said Jaubert.
The team notifies webmasters hosting the sites and offers them tools to battle the virus. After treatment, the Google team tests and removes the warning.
They recommend that people keep their browsers updated and ensure that their systems contain no vulnerabilities.
