Malware on woodtv.com
December 12th, 2007 at 2:37 pm by Dave DeJonge under Inside WOOD TV8
Let me start off by apologizing to anyone whose computer was affected by the malicious advertisement that appeared on woodtv.com in the last few days. I really hope all of you had sufficient antivirus protection running.
You’ll know you saw the problem it if our website suddenly disappeared and a pop-up ad for Performance Optimizer appeared. It seems that there were several ads running through the site that were programmed to make this happen.
It was a very difficult problem to track down because the ads were programmed to use the malicious code every once in a while, not all the time. To the casual viewer, the ads looked perfectly normal.
We take this problem very seriously and attacked it as vigorously as possible. I only wish we could have fixed it sooner.
We, and our ad providers, take steps to insure problems like this don’t occur. In this case, the bad guys won and we learned a lesson. We’ll make changes to prevent it from happening again.
To the best of our knowledge, the problem is gone and has not occurred in the past 24 hours.
If you’re interested in following this type of thing, I found other reports of this malware happening elsewhere:
DoubleClick serves up vast malware blitz
Malware hits Australian White Pages
Thousands snared by malware warning from big-name websites
Internet Director for WOODTV.com
Thanks for fixing that. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but it wouldn’t happen all the time.
Was wondering what site was doing that, I often had three different browsers open to various forums, and all three would suddenly hop to that crap.
I had the same thing happen. I think I ended the task about 1 second into it since I knew it was not right.
Not only do you need antivirus software, everyone should have a program to block and remove spyware. If you have a Mac, those are two things one shouldn’t have to worry so much about.
In the Windows world, here’s a list of anti-spyware software…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware#Anti-spyware_programs
All, if not most, are free.
Oh, thank goodness! I was worried that it was my computer that had malware. I found it odd that only woodtv.com was affected.
Wow, that’s gotta be a big win for the bad guys if they managed to successfully attack the ad providers.
Nice job on the new site, Dave
Where’s the celebratory blog on the redesign? Looks really sharp, I’m always impressed but what you guys come up with. Again, could use some more bass fishing info.