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Banner Ad on Myspace Serves Adware to 1 Million
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."
And they wonder why consumers want to block all ads. Its because of illegal virus ads like this. If they prosecuted spyware companies the way they do with other virus creators we would not have as much of a problem with people setting up shop as if this is a legitimate business and then hijacking people's computers for profit and waiting for enough complaints to pile up that maybe the state attempts an enforcement action which at worst closes the company and more likely a few small fines and promises to behave in the future. Either way the owners of these companies never serve a day in prison for releasing their viruses.
His solution to the hack that destroys a section of your profile is not that he will fix the site, but that you should install Flash 9.
How about Myspace as well? It is easily argued that Myspace controls the banner space and content added to the 'global' site (ie every page). This is akin to aiding and abetting.
The sad thing is that a million PCs were infected, and probably 500,000 of them will -stay- infected. And will this even remotely hurt Myspace's market share/traffic? I seriously doubt it.
Please help metamoderate.
Lots of exploits that have been released have been fixed before the exploit made the rounds. Its just that the type of moron MySpace caters to are also the type of moron that won't ever learn how to do things right.
MySpace knows its users are idiots, and that they aren't going anywhere until their 15 minutes of fame are up. What do they care that ads they carry also target those same idiots.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I had dilbert.com as my home-page for years, but recently gave up on it in disgust. 9 times out of 10 Firefox would block anything upto 3 popups, and then they started to carry an extremly obnoxious popup that even Firefox couldn't block. I figure anyone being that anti-social doesn't want me around, so I left. If I were Scott Adams I'd be outraged by United Medias total dimwitedness, but I guess his Clue departed many years ago.