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Banner Ad on Myspace Serves Adware to 1 Million

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the have-some-pop-ups dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog reports that a banner ad running on MySpace.com and other Web sites used a Windows security flaw to push adware and spyware out to more than one million computer users this week. The attack leveraged the Windows Metafile (WMF) exploit to install programs in the PurityScan/ClickSpring family of adware, which bombards the user with pop-up ads and tracks their Web usage."

3 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. DNS Ad-blocking by computergeek1200 · · Score: 5, Informative

    My solution to solve this problem is to block the domains of the servers that host these ads such as (pagead2.googlesyndication.com) by using a dns server. This is better than firefox ad-blocking or most other systems. This system prevents any connection to the advertising server. I have a dns server for ad-blocking that is publicly avaiable at 68.147.32.114.

    Click here to see if you configured your dns properly.
    1. Re:DNS Ad-blocking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Using a public DNS server requires a fair amount of trust. I'd rather have just a list of hosts to block, which are widely available and much less of a security risk.

  2. Virus/adware-spreading ads by john_prog · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ads can be a growing security risk in the future. I'd like to ban all ads at work, but I can't do that since IE6 is the only allowed browser here and no extra software is allowed to be installed. Once I surfed to Dilbert website for comics that I thought would be safe, but Errorsafe malware tried to install itself to my machine (by ActiveX component in an ad). See http://koti.mbnet.fi/jnyman/dilbert.html screen capture here (the dialogue text is in Finnish, but the bottom line asks "Do you want to install Errorsafe program to your computer to check your computer for free (recommended)?". I complained about this to Dilbert website's webmaster and to Scott Adams and they replied that they're looking at the problem, but after that nothing. Haven't visited Dilbert website since at work. Hope this is not a growing trend.