I’ve had so many people get infected with variations of AntiVirus 2009 and each one has said they never loaded anything or “I don’t visit bad sites.” Well here is a perfect example of why what you think you did and what you actually did are not always the same when it comes to the web.

In this case I pulled up a site I think most would consider “safe”, The Christian Science Monitor. However within that page was a redirect to another server located in Germany owned by a guy in Norway. Of course the infected server I was being redirected to could easily be a legit site which has been hacked or a site setup to specifically try to distribute malware and in this case I suspect the latter as no website actually exist on that server. As to the source of the infection my bet is one of the Flash banners on the primary site was the source of the redirect and just one more reason to disable plug ins whenever possible. Instead of a hacker needing to attack Christian Science Monitor all they have to do is go after the company offering up the advertising banners or even sign up as an advertiser.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.