Yesterday morning, while reading the New York Times online, I was confronted with an attempted security attack, apparently delivered through an advertisement. A window popped up, mimicking an antivirus scanner. After “scanning” my computer, it reported finding viruses and invited me to download a free antivirus scanner. The displays implied, without quite saying so, that the messages came from my antivirus vendor and that the download would come from there too. Knowing how these things work, I recognized it right away as an attack, probably carried by an ad. So I didn’t click on anything, and I’m fairly certain my computer wasn’t infected.
I wasn’t the only person who saw this attack. The Times posted a brief note on its site yesterday, and followed up today with a longer blog post.
What is interesting about the Times’s response is that it consists of security warnings, rather than journalism. Security warnings are good as far as they go; the Times owed that much to its users, at least. But it’s also newsworthy that a major, respected news site was facilitating cybercrime, even unintentionally. Somebody should report on this story — and who better than the Times itself?
It’s probably an interesting story, involving the ugly underside of the online ad business. Most likely, ad space in the Times was sold and, presumably, resold to an actual attacker; or a legitimate ad placement service was penetrated. Either way, other people are at risk of the same attack. Even better, the story opens issues such as the difficulties of securing the web, what vendors are doing to improve matters, what the bad buys are trying to achieve, and what happens to the victims.
An enterprising technology reporter might find a fascinating story here — and it’s right under the noses of the Times staff. Let’s hope they jump on it.
UPDATE (Sept. 15): As Barry points out in the comments below, the Times wrote a good article the day after this post appeared. It turns out that the booby-trapped ad was not sold through an ad network, as one might have expected. Instead, the ad space was sold directly by the Times, to a party who was pretending to be Vonage. The perpetrators ran Vonage ads for a while, then switched over to serving the malicious ads.
