Friday, July 21, 2006
MySpace Served Spyware to a Million Users
The Headline Reads: Hacked Ad Seen on MySpace Served Spyware to a Million
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON THESE DAYS! You can't even browse a site without having to worry whether or not your computer is going to get hacked! What a damn shame! This is why I started using Firefox...
An online banner advertisement that ran on MySpace.com and other sites over the past week used a Windows security flaw to infect more than a million users with spyware when people merely browsed the sites with unpatched versions of Windows, according to data collected by iDefense, a Verisign company.
Michael La Pilla, an iDefense "malcode" analyst, said he first spotted the attack Sunday while browsing MySpace on a Linux-based machine. When he browsed a page headed with an ad for DeckOutYourDeck.com, his browser asked him whether he wanted to open a file called exp.wmf. Microsoft released a patch in January to fix a serious security flaw in the way Windows renders WMF (Windows Metafile) images, and online criminal groups have been using the flaw to install adware, keystroke loggers and all manner of invasive software for the past seven months.
Internet Explorer users who visited a Web page containing this ad and whose IE was not equipped with the WMF patch would not get that warning. Rather, their machines would silently download a Trojan horse program that installs junk software in the PurityScan/ClickSpring family of adware. This stuff bombards the user with pop-up ads and tracks their Web usage. Only a little more than half of the anti-virus programs used at anti-virus testing service AV-Test.org flagged the various programs that the Trojan tried to download as malicious or suspicious.
I love myspace and all, but they've got to do better with this kind of shit!
posted by Soulfull @ 7/21/2006 , 
2 Comments:
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At 7/23/2006 8:01 AM,
ILLstate said...
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it's a damn shame
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At 7/24/2006 3:15 PM,
Soulfull said...
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Hey illstate! It sure is... I'm waiting patiently for the lawsuit that is bound to come up because these companies keep putting us at risk!
