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Anatomy of an Attempted Malware Scam
Dynamoo writes "Malicious advertisements are getting more and more common as the Bad Guys try to use reputable ad networks to spread malware. Julia Casale-Amorim of Casale Media details the lengths that some fake companies will go to to convince ad networks to take the bait."
reputable ad networks? What are those? Is he speaking of google ad-sense? or Hulu ads? Personally, I don't consider ad networks that use banner ads as anything that are reputable (this includes any of the shady ad-networks that Google purchased as well). Non-obtrusive text ads, I can deal with. Even Hulu ads, I can deal with since it's film on film. It's just that I hate banner ads, or animated ads, when I'm in reading-mode.
I'm also suitably stupefied. All the "pink" and "red" flags that they are obviously so clever to spot, and which she spends almost the entire article talking about, are just her dancing around the elephant in the room: that she and her team are complete fucking idiots.
Part of me wonders if there is a difference in industries which makes this look so damn stupid.
Anyone in IT has probably seen so much malware, so many phishing and scam attempts that there's a strong chance most of us would have checked any company registration numbers with the relevant authorities, checked WHOIS information and contacted the bank directly using one of the banks' own published numbers before even returning the first email. But if you didn't normally meet such rubbish (because the IT department has already filtered out most of the malware, scams and phishing attempts before they even hit your mailbox), I wonder if you'd develop the same level of cynicism?