Google on Tuesday began warning some users of its search service that their computers may be infected with a virus.

Recently, Google found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of its data centers. The company determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or "malware." As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results:



This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called "proxies," according to Google security engineer Damian Menscher.

"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," Menscher said.