An Online report has claimed that some leading Websites unknowingly ran malicious Online advertisements this past Sunday that attacked users’ computers.
According to the report by IDG News Service as published in Computer World, though the Websites weren’t at fault, they were “unwitting victims” of “malvertising”, a scheme where cyberattackers upload harmful ads to Online advertising companies, which are then distributed to top-tier publishers. As a result, tens of thousands of computers could have been exposed to the harmful advertisements. Some of these ads have been removed, claimed the report. They came through ads placed by major Online advertising networks.
A report by Online security firm Trend Micro referred to this, too. Fraud Researcher Joseph Chen wrote on the blog that top-tier news sites, entertainment portals, & political commentary sites were among the victims of a massive malvertising campaign related to the Angler Exploit Kit. This campaign, he said, was targeting users in the United States & could have affected tens of thousands of users in the last 24 hours alone.
Based on the monitoring by this agency, the malicious ads were delivered by a compromised ad network in these highly-visited mainstream Websites. As of this writing, while the more popular portals appear to be no longer carrying the bad ad, the malvertising campaign was still ongoing, continuing to put users at risk of downloading malware into their systems.
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