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
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