26 January 2011, 11:51

ICQ ads found to be serving malware

According to Kaspersky, ICQ adverts are responsible for serving scareware to unsuspecting users. The researcher says that recently they have received reports of computers infected with a fake anti-virus application named "Antivirus 8". The difference in this case was that popups for this fake anti-virus were appearing when users were not actively using their computers.

Further investigation found that it was triggered when the ICQ chat application was fetching and displaying new adverts. The advert in question appears to pretend to be a clothing store, but URLs within an embedded iframe relate to another server, as if the store had been hacked. The researcher suggests that the criminals responsible booked the ad campaign while pretending to be the clothing store, and then made it look as though they were hacked in order to fool the ad distribution network into allowing them to continue advertising. Kaspersky has notified the ad distributor of the malicious adverts.

(djwm)

« previous | next »

Print Version | Send by email | Permalink: http://h-online.com/-1177321