Malware -- Coors light ad

[j_ung 0]

If you haven't been around for a few days, you may not know that, starting Friday, we had a particularly bad ad running. It is worth noting that the ad was using the Coors brand, but wasn’t connected with the company in any way. The ad messed up the way the site loaded for a lot of people and attempted to prompt users to download a malware program. The fact that the ad launched on the weekend made it more difficult to isolate and fix. We responded as soon as possible, but the ad was intermittently visible to users between Friday evening and Saturday afternoon.

As always, it's a good idea to make sure your antivirus software and computer settings are up to date to block this sort of thing if it squeaks through the defenses of whatever websites you visit. If you are concerned that your computer may have been affected by the ads, it's probably a good idea to go here and follow the directions:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/malware-removal/remove-extra-antivir

Going forward, I and the Namemedia geeks are doing a few things to prevent similar problematic ads from making it to the site in the future:

1. The ad folks at Namemedia are beefing up their tools for detecting ads that contain adware/malware/spyware.
2. New ad campaigns from new advertisers will no longer be launched late in the day, especially on Friday. This will ensure that the right people are available if there’s a problem.
3. We’ll be installing an emergency ad-kill switch that will allow me (and a couple other select folks) to quickly remove ads if a similar problem comes to our attention.

Okay, that's about all I have, except for this. The buck has to stop at somebody, and on Dropzone.com, that's me. I promise I'll do my best to stop it from happening again.

Thanks folks,
Jay

[j_ung 0]

There's a discussion here if you're interested.

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3423239;page=unread#unread