Malvertisements in NYTimes.com Lead to FAKE Antivirus!

People who get their regular dose of news from the New York Times website were recently told to be careful when browsing through the said site as malicious advertisements —also known as “malvertisements” —are found on its pages and are displaying pop-up windows that falsely report malware infections on their systems.

As reported in detail by Trend Micro researcher Rik Ferguson in the Counter Measures blog, the New York Times issued warnings through both Twitter and its website’s front page about malvertisements that trigger the display of a malicious pop-up window. The said pop-up window displays the typical fake antivirus warning indicating malware infection. This forces the affected user to purchase a full version of a rogue antivirus software. Of course, the reported infections are in reality nonexistent. The alarming messages are mere distractions to convince the user into giving away important information.

Not only is good money wasted on purchasing a useless software. Important information such as credit card details are also compromised and made available to cybercriminals.

Lately I have been personally seeing a ton of computers at work with this exact infection (Personal Antivirus). The odd thing I take from it is that it doesn’t usually bring along any other malware with it when it gets onto a system. From time to time I see this program on a system that is infected with a rootkit or other more vicious piece of malware, but for the most part, it seems to work alone and does nothing but want to get your money and credit card information.

So it would seem that the creators of this certain rogue security software don’t want to harm their victim’s computers why placing harmful trojans on the system with it, but merely to create an annoying piece of software that will bug you until you pay it to stop… or remove it with a program such as Spybot – Search and Destroy. So be careful out there… cause even well trusted websites seem to be getting hit with these types of breaches that can harm your computer!