Virus In The Ads

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the still-using-IE? dept

Because it isn’t already easy enough to get a virus on your computer with IE, it appears that an ad serving company with a number of big name clients had its machines compromised for a time over the weekend. Rather than just seeing an ad, certain visitors using Internet Explorer on an unpatched Windows machine would have a virus downloaded while they were visiting websites from The Register, NBC Universal, AtomSchockwave, The Golf Channel and a variety of other sites. While anyone who was using a different OS or browser (or adequately patched) wouldn’t have a problem, this does still show how much more risky it’s getting to do anything on the internet without making sure everything is locked up tight. It used to be that people trying to push out web-born malware would try to trick people into visiting a site. However, with things like this, it shows how much more aggressive some are getting — trying to make legitimate sites serve up destructive files without people realizing it.