Gizmodo: Sorry, our site had malware in ads
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Cyber attackers managed to place web ads containing malware on the popular gadget website Gizmodo, using a scam similar to one that fooled the New York Times into hosting malware on its website.
"Guys, I'm really sorry but we had some malware running on our site in ad boxes for a little while last week on Suzuki ads," Gizmodo's Brian Lam posted on Gizmodo.com Tuesday. "They somehow fooled our ad sales team through an elaborate scam. It's taken care of now and only a few people should have been affected."
Lam said Gizmodo didn't recognize the malvertisements that target Windows computer because "everyone on staff is on OS X or Linux for production machines."
The site warns that the malware file can be found as "qegasysguard.exe" on infected PCs.
In a similar attack that infected the New York Times homepage in September, the malicious ads spread a fake antivirus scareware attack to web browsers on the site before it was taken down. In that attack, the scammers bought seemingly legitimate ads that they used to insert malicious code on the site.
Web security researchers at Dasient recently reported finding more than 600,000 websites running malicious script without site owners' knowledge.
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