Hacked Ad Seen on MySpace Served Spyware

It looks like browsing MySpace might have been an unsafe thing to do during the past week, as a Windows security flaw left more than a million users with spyware thanks to visiting the social network site.

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 hope this is a one time problem, as with MySpace's audience, a million people is not all that many. Could you imagine the effects if only ten percent of their members, or around 6.5 million people were infected with the Trojan?

Hacked Ad Seen on MySpace Served Spyware to a Million [Washington Post]

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Hacked Ad Seen on MySpace Served Spyware

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