The Mountain View company's malware notifications are more than useful for the unprotected users that are surfing the Internet without any security solutions installed on their systems. However, Google wants more than a simple alert displayed every time a user wants to click on a malicious link and tries to clarify the security matter at the Googleplex. Panayiotis Mavrommatis and Niels Provos, Anti-Malware Team, posted a message on the company's blog to present some shocking statistics that revealed a dangerous virtual world for all the users. "To protect Google's users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search," the Google employees said about their security efforts.

As you can see in the picture attached to the article, Google designed a malware map that presents the most dangerous zones hosting malicious files. The highest malware activity was marked with red, meaning that Russia, Germany and the US are storing the biggest amount of infected sites. "These are servers that are used by malware authors to distribute their payload. Very often the compromised sites are modified to include content from these servers," the Google Team added.

However, it's obvious that the security of our computers is more and more threatened and we can protect ourselves using some simple tips. For example, Google encourages users to keep their operating system updated with the latest patches and fixes because they can avoid possible hack attempts based on the recently discovered vulnerabilities. Also, the Mountain View company offers quite a paranoiac solution: run your browser into a virtual machine... Anyway, I recommend you to install a powerful antivirus solution and keep it up-to-date with the latest definitions. If you're currently looking for one, you can find it on Softpedia using this link.