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Google's Doubleclick Ad Servers Exposed Millions of Computers To Malware

Posted by timothy on from the but-zedo-is-awesome dept.

wabrandsma (2551008) writes with this excerpt from The Verge: Last night, researchers at Malwarebytes noticed strange behavior on sites like Last.fm, The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post. Ads on the sites were being unusually aggressive, setting off anti-virus warnings and raising flags in a number of Malwarebytes systems. After some digging, researcher Jerome Segura realized the problem was coming from Google's DoubleClick ad servers and the popular Zedo ad agency. Together, they were serving up malicious ads designed to spread the recently identified Zemot malware. A Google representative has confirmed the breach, saying "our team is aware of this and has taken steps to shut this down."

3 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Re: And they wonder why I block ads... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just use adblock+. It is much faster.

  2. Ad Blockers... by Dega704 · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of the best endpoint security tools you can deploy.

  3. Re:And they wonder why I block ads... by TubeSteak · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sometimes pages serves content from a different domain but that is rare enough to manage manually.

    Not anymore.
    Far too many sites (/. included) have or use a CDN for content.
    And they will fetch at least half a dozen scripts for bookmarking/sharing with facebook/linkedin/tumblr/twitter/pinterest/googlehangouts/etc
    Then, they'll try and fetch a non-zero number of tracking/website monitoring scripts.

    Ghostery says http://slashdot.org/images/njs.gif is a 1x1 pixel tracker for WebTrends.

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!