grandpa - 8:45 pm on Sep 14, 2009 (gmt 0)

Over the weekend an advertiser swapped their ads, and the new ad was actually a malicious ad. I saw it happen on Sunday but apparently the malicious ads started on Saturday.

The New York Times Company said on Monday that NYTimes.com was the victim of an attacker who first posed as a legitimate advertiser, then started hitting site visitors with aggressive advertisements that appeared to be warnings about viruses.

According to the article, the advertiser posted seemingly legitimate ads for a week prior to the swap, presuming (correctly I might add) that no one would be around over the weekend to stop the malicious ads.

Of course a lot of their readers are hot under the collar, understandable. Most of the net savvy readers saw the scam for what it was and closed their browser. Others did not take the correct action, and instead clicked on the message that told them their computer was infected and needed to run the scan (Click Here Now). Possibly a few people are now just a little smarter about browsing in the new millennium... possibly.

NY Times story [bits.blogs.nytimes.com]