A quick-witted Google engineer has uncovered evidence that as many as one million Windows PCs appear to be infected by browser redirection malware that is sending searches through proxy servers in order to generate traffic.

This type of attack has been around for years in one form or another, but the scale of what Google engineer Damian Menscher chanced upon from a single family of malware is still unusual in its scale.

Performing routine maintenance on a data center, Menscher noticed unusual traffic still arriving at the servers from unusual addresses. Calling in help from security experts, it was discovered that the requests were coming from a large clutch of PCs infected by proxy redirection malware.

More: http://www.pcworld.com/article/236323/g