Malware Showing Up On Legit Sites
from the it's-everywhere! dept
Since it's fairly well known at this point that sketchy sites can try to trick users into installing malware, it appears that malware creators are increasingly looking for ways to make its malware available from more legitimate sites. Two recent stories highlight this trend. First is the news that some hackers successfully rigged Google to link to sites that installed malware on certain popular searches. It took a fairly elaborate scheme to get it to work -- and it only lasted for a few days -- but it does highlight that just because a site's found via Google, it doesn't mean that it's safe. The second one apparently involves the popular urban legend debunking (or confirming) website, Snopes.com. Apparently, a well-known purveyor of adware has been running questionable or misleading ads (via Slashdot) on the site for over six months. Snopes was apparently told about this ad, but still chose to leave it running.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: legit sites, malware
Companies: google, snopes
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Be careful out there
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Ads?
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Re: Ads?
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can you imagine, coming home at the end of the day, "hi honey, i really planted some good viruses today", or, "i really found some clever near-mispellings to park some junk ad- sites on".
people are useless, for the most part, and deserve the governments they get. after all, it is representative.
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Re:
"people are useless, for the most part, and deserve the governments they get. after all, it is representative"
What ?
Wow - have another beer, sounds like you need it.
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use your head
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Re: use your head
IE7 is hardly "great"...it is a definite improvement over IE6, and finally brought itself up to speed with other browsers (still no built in mouse gestures though) that had long outpaced it. Firefox blows IE7 away in functionality due to the extensive plug in community which allows users to customize their browser.
"I always here "use firefox! and macs!" you will be safe. It gets annoying"
Macs are tend to be less susceptible to viruses and malware for a few reasons, including their relatively low market share and being built on a (generally) more secure OS (BSD).
Vanilla Firefox is slightly safer than IE7 for the simple fact that it ignores ActiveX controls. Firefox with AdBlock Plus and NoScript is a hell of a lot safer than IE7. Granted, NoScript uses a whitelist to block javascript, which might annoy some users, but it allows domain level javascript blocking that blows IE's jscript "on or off" security out of the water.
I'm not sure what type of pages you're looking at, but I've never had any significant problems with Firefox's rendering of web pages. At worst, a site uses outdated vbscript menus that don't work, or a particular web app was written exclusively for IE. Other than that, no problems.
The IE7Pro plug-in helps eliminate a few of IE7's shortcomings, by adding some basic adblocking, but after using both, AdBlock Plus for Firefox is a more robust and effective solution.
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Re: use your head
haaa...Here is my response to that...
http://ubersoft.net/comic/hd/2000/09/emerson-never-said
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Yeah... I dunno but I've always followed that ideology.
Wildly clicking on everyting like a drunken baboon is probably not the best of solutions when looking to top up your v14gr4 prescription.
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Snopes has stopped
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