NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Warning: New York Times ad system antispam contamination continues
Greetings. The New York Times ad delivery system has apparently been contaminated by some form of illicit antispam ad injection exploit. I first saw this upon clicking a NYT home page story link yesterday on one machine, and a few minutes ago was hit again via a different NYT home page story link on a completely different local computer: Here's a screen capture: http://bit.ly/m04qo Early today the Times posted a note regarding this problem ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/media/13note.html?hp - but clicking on this link may also trigger the beast!), though it was not made particularly clear that the contamination is *ongoing* and that the Times had not yet successfully cleansed their ad system. It is not immediately obvious how dangerous the pop up is (just an insistent, hard to kill ad? A virus? Or?), but as usual in these situations clicking on them in any form (even to "Cancel" or "Close") is unwise. Depending on your browser and configuration, you may not be able to close you browser at all, and even killing the browser process may result in being returned to the same contaminated state the next time you start your browser (in my case, this was all under Firefox). The best recommendation if you hit this beastie is to immediately reboot your system. If on your next browser start you get an error from your browser, discard any existing sessions and start a new session if possible. Hopefully the Times will really get this fixed sometime soon, regardless of the problem's initial origin. Until then, clicking on any New York Times links should be carefully considered. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren@vortex.com Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org Founder, GCTIP - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance - http://www.gctip.org Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein