Hackers Use Banner Ads on Major Sites to Hijack Your PC 268
The worst-case scenario used to be that online ads are pesky, memory-draining distractions. But a new batch of banner ads is much more sinister: They hijack personal computers and bully users until they agree to buy antivirus software. And the ads do their dirty work even if you don't click on them.The malware-spiked ads have been spotted on various legitimate websites, ranging from the British magazine The Economist to baseball's MLB.com to the Canada.com news portal. Hackers are using deceptive practices and tricky Flash programming to get their ads onto legitimate sites by way of DoubleClick's DART program. Web publishers use the DoubleClick-hosted platform to manage advertising inventory." CT: Link updated to original source instead of plagerizer.
AdBlock and NoScript (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like a reason to just block all double-click items...
I don't enable flash/scripts on any page unless it is needed -- like scripts for
ISP's should block DoubleClick (Score:3, Interesting)
Do it for a month and DoubleClick and their ilk will be extra sure about not hosting bad stuff.
Your company/family/school (Score:5, Interesting)
I would say that adzapper (if you use squid) or a DNS-based blacklist is quite mandatory wherever you do have a say. Glancing at the logs of ISPs I have root at, roughly 1/4 of all freaking http requests go to lowlifes -- and even that based on my grossly incomplete list of ad/spyware/tracking scum.
Yeah, 25%. That's horrible.
And there are some customers dumb enough to complain if you do protect them from ads, so you can't do this in an ISP scenario. But in a company, school or family? Hell yeah, there's no reason for doubleclick.com to get through, ever.
Say.. doesn't Slashdot use Doubleclick? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, granted, the malware distributors typically tag ads for subjects not often seen on Slashdot (but I get them on, e.g., the Sinfest comic - huh, imagine that).
I'd say it's about time Doubleclick (that's you, Google, if you finally get to say you did indeed acquire it and everybody OK'd the deal.) gets held a little more responsible for this sort of thing being done through their network for which they collect money.
Re:I only found these ads on.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Even in a web page, someone can make an image that looks exactly like a default message box on your OS (which can be guessed from the User Agent string) and have every part of that image tied to malicious results.
btw, yeah, Ctrl-F4 is close for a window (like a message box) and Alt-F4 is close for an application or new browser window.