Blog Focus: Malware Scam Scams Gawker Media
Everyone gets fooled every once in a while. Even on the Interwebs. And sometimes even the big dogs of the blogosphere get caught out.
But when one of the big dogs happens to be a media company (read = Gawker Media) which runs a flagship snarky gossip blog (read = Gawker) and they got got (to paraphrase from The Wire) by a malware crew pretending to be Suzuki, it stands to reason that there’s going to be some bloggy chatter about what went down:
• The Blog Herald: Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s hugely popular technology/gadget blog, has had to apologise to its readers for allowing ads containing malware to be published on its site during the past week.
Their ad sales team was duped by an elaborate scam that would have infected some users with software that may have caused random passwords and possibly initiated phishing attacks.
• Silicon Valley Insider: The "ads" crashed readers' browsers, and, in some cases, installed spyware. Gawker--no babes in the woods on this issue--have been kind enough to share their correspondence with the scammers… Publishers have been warned!
• Graham Cluley’s Blog: Gizmodo is one of the biggest blogs in the world, boasting an average 3.1 million page views every day - but it's not the first widely read website to be hit by malicious adverts (a phenomenon described recently by Google as "malvertising").
• Tech Watch: Gizmodo says that the episode has been taken care of now, and the malware would have been spotted sooner but for the fact that the staff all run Mac or Linux production machines. It might be an idea to get at least one of them on Windows.
To their credit, Gizmodo has responded with a public apology:
• Gizmodo: Guys, I'm really sorry but we had some malware running on our site in ad boxes for a little while last week on Suzuki ads. They somehow fooled our ad sales team through an elaborate scam. It's taken care of now, and only a few people should have been affected, but this isn't something we take lightly as writers, editors and tech geeks.
