Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

Can’t get a virus through a Banner Advert? Think again…

According to this article, banner ads distributed from heavy-weight online advertising company DoubleClick have been inadvertantly spreading malware. The code was wrapped up cunningly into the adverts themselves, actually buried in the Flash. Once loaded it diverts the user away from the site they were looking at to tell them it’s doing a virus check and you need to install software. If you hit the ‘cancel’ button, it simply restarts the process and asks you to install it again. The only way I found to get around it was to shut down your browser….not good! There is some more info in this YouTube video.

This has apparently been tracked back a company called AdTran, based in Russia, so keep an eye out and if you aren’t expecting to download anything then don’t. Also keep this in mind even if you are on well known sites. There was a recent case of Alicia Keys MySpace being hacked so that when the user clicked to watch a video (or almost anything else) they were told they needed to install a video codec to watch it. If they clicked ‘OK’ on this, then they got really clobbered. It also installed less nasty stuff in the background which could be picked up by a virus scan, but only if you remember to do this regularly and keep your operating system up to date.

So, the two things to take away from this

1. Regular updates to your system and your virus software
2. If in doubt do not let software install - especially if you hit cancel and it tries again!!