Posted by Virus Bulletin on Sep 11, 2007
Infectious flash adverts displayed on major sites.
Advertising supplied by ad firm Right Media, a company bought out by web giant Yahoo! earlier this year after an initial investment in October 2006, has been serving up ads which use exploits to drop malware onto vulnerable systems.
The ads are thought to have appeared on a number of major sites, including those of MySpace, PhotoBucket, BeBo and UK newspaper The Sun, and may have been used on several million page impressions during August. The flash-based ads load an iframe which attempts a drive-by download, infecting unpatched systems via vulnerabilities.
According to Right Media, the trojan is capable of detecting requests from its 'Media Guard' content-checking system and thus hiding the malware during its security filtering process, allowing the malicious software through to end-users. Users are advised to ensure their systems are fully up to date with the latest patches from Microsoft and all other software providers, to minimise the exposure to vulnerabilities.
More detail on the incident is at Security Fix here. Details of the 'Media Guard' system are on the Right Media blog here and here.
Posted on 11 September 2007 by Virus Bulletin
