Google Chrome users, among others, couldn't access some of the most
popular Web sites Monday after an advertising network's corporate Web
site was injected with malware. But, according to the ad company's chief
executive, those sites were safe.
Those who called up sites such
as The Huffington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington
Post and many other media sites, among others, were greeted with a
warning that the sites contained malware. An example of a warning:
"Content from cm.netseer.com, a known malware distributor, has been
inserted into this web page. Visiting this page now is very likely to
infect your computer with malware." Another warned that the virus
peddler was images.buddytv.com.
In both cases, the culprit turned
out to be the Santa Clara, Calif. startup Netseer, an advertising
provider with a considerable global digital footprint.
"Early this morning we received alerts that our 3rd
party hosted corporate website (netseer.com) was hacked and infected
with malware. Consequently, Google added our domain to the list of
malware affected websites and Chrome and some other browsers started
blocking any sites that had ‘netseer.com’ code," according to a letter from the CEO on the company's homepage.
"Our
ad serving infrastructure is completely different from the corporate
website but shares the same domain (netseer.com). So although the
malware never impacted the ad serving all our ad serving partners saw
Chrome and other browsers flagging malware warnings to users. To
reiterate, the malware was never served into ad serving stream and the
browser behavior was completely due to ad serving and the corporate
website sharing the same domain name."
The company said Google had
removed the site from its malware impacted site list by 9:30 a.m.
Pacific time, but users continued to report blocked sites hours
throughtout the day.
According to various news reports, Internet Explorer users had no trouble accessing the impacted sites with that browser.
Courtesy by Anne Saita
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