Google Warns 20,000 Websites That Could Be Infected With Malware

Google has warned 20,000 websites that they might be hacked and injected with JavaScript redirect malware, Google said. In a message posted on one of the compromised websites, the Google Search Quality Team warned:

"Dear site owner or webmaster, we are writing to let you know that we believe some of your website's pages may be hacked. Specifically, we think that JavaScript has been injected into your site by a third party and may be used to redirect users to malicious sites. You should check your source code for any unfamiliar JavaScript and in particular any files containing 'eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,r)'. The malicious code may be placed in HTML, JavaScript, or PHP files so it's important to be thorough in your search."

It is not the first time Google has warned website owners to look for malware infections, Google spokesman Mark Jansen said in an email.

"It's part of our ongoing mission to be transparent with webmasters and do our bit to help prevent spam," he said. "In fact this isn't a new phenomenon; we communicate very openly with webmasters and always have done. We have gradually been opening up the types of issues that we send notifications for over the past few months, because we want to communicate more openly about potential issues, leading to a large increase in the number of messages."

At Google's current rate of notifications, the search engine looks set to alert about 4.2 million webmasters this year, although this assumes that it does not open the scope of notifications further, and that the rate of compromised sites remains steady.

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