Technical Tidbits™

If you’ve read any of the comments on the original post: What Ad Server is Dishing up Malware and Bots? – then you know this is being reported as a widespread problem hitting many sites and many users.

I’m very curious to know how many people are not using RUBotted and are therefore getting hit with this bot? I think I’ll need to run a check on my test machine today.

Anyway, there were two other schools of thought on this and one of them was that perhaps a Microsoft Update had affected this. I don’t believe so.  The reason I state that is that my machine was fully patched before this happened but our marketing director’s machine had not been. He had not updated to the newest security patches when he started getting the notices. (He updates on weekends.) So that eliminates the update theory.

The other thought that I had was perhaps a JAVA problem. I had also performed a Java update and the pages that are delivering this warning are all using Javascript to run the ads. But here lies the problem with that theory: This blog is using Javascript for adsense and it’s not appearing here. Plus, I play yahoo online games every morning with my coffee and it runs a Java Applet for the TextTwist game and I don’t get it the warning there. Yet, when I go to Mail or the main page, I do get it. So, it would be a very strange javascript that only certain sites are using that would be a culprit.

Additionally, why don’t all the pages on a specific site issue the warning if the same javascript code is being used?

I surfed tarot.com this morning without an incident until about 6 pages in. But I was reading various pages for a few minutes on each page, and they have rotating ads that constantly refresh.  So obviously, it’s a specific ad that is spreading this. That’s all I can figure so far.

Reports are coming in from users that they receive it at various page locations on:

• Tarot.com
• Business Week
• Yahoo
• Yahoo Mail
• Reuters
• The Register
• Dictionary.com
• CNN.com
• InfoWorld.com

If you’ve found others not listed here, please feel free to add to the list by commenting!

We will continue to keep you updated as we learn about this.

However, I can tell you that the warnings have slowed down. I’m not getting them as often as I have in the past day or two.

• Could it be that the ad companies have realized their servers were breached and are taking steps to fix them?
• Could the ad companies have found the advertiser responsible?
• Do they even care?
• Has the Anti-malware providers updated our protection to protect us?

Your guess is as good as mine because no one is talking!

One thing this does do, is make us website owners rethink this whole adsense thing as a way of making money. Do I want to make piddly pennies per day at the risk of serving my readers bots? I don’t think so!

And as Internet users, it makes us rethink how valuable sites that are serving up this risk to us really are! Isn’t our pc security worth more?

Something to think about in the days ahead – for sure!

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