14 DAY TRIAL // Unidentified attackers have managed to push a malicious advertisement onto the website of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the biggest newspaper in Minnesota. The startribune.com admins disabled all advertising on the site yesterday and told readers to perform free security scans.
The attack began on Sunday, with readers reporting seeing suspicious alerts while browsing the startribune.com website. "Users received what appeared to be a warning message from the Windows operating system (Apple Macintosh computers appear not to have been affected). The warning said the computer had a problem, and it urged the user to click on the warning message for help," Steve Alexander, a technology reporter with the newspaper, explained.
Clicking on the rogue alerts was obviously not a good idea, because it triggered a scareware download. Scareware, also known as rogueware, are computer programs marketed through deceptive and invasive tactics, such as false warnings, whose ultimate purpose is to scare users into paying for a useless license fee.
According to Mr. Alexander, the malicious application's behavior was similar to that exhibited by ransomware, programs that disable critical functionality and ask for money in order to restore it. Infected users reported that it drastically affected their computers' performance and blocked access to other programs, except for the web browser.
The website's entire advertising feed was disabled pending a thorough investigation into the incident and several free security solutions such as Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG Free Edition and Spybot Search & Destroy were recommended to affected readers. We would like to add Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware to that list, a security product particularly efficient in cleaning scareware.
Malvertizements, ads that carry malicious code, rose up to become a very serious problem in recent years. They are an even more serious issue when attackers manage to slip them onto websites with a large audience. Last year, we reported about similar incidents involving the New York Times website, the Gizmodo technology blog and the site of British celebrity gossip magazine, Digital Spy.