For the past couple of weeks several banner ads served by Right Media Network have inflicted Trojan viruses on visitors to high-traffic sites such as MySpace.com and Photobucket.com.

Getting infected with the Trojan virus was as easy as browsing a web page displaying the infected banner ads with a copy of Internet Explorer that hadn’t been updated with the latest Microsoft Security Fix. That’s right, users didn’t have to do anything except browse the page containing the Trojan infected banners.

Right Media, which was recently bought by Yahoo, was quick to react to the incident and has identified and banned those banner ads from the Right Media Network. But this does not address the already infected users.

Looking closely into the Trojan Horse Program that were infecting the banner ads, Scansafe said that those malicious ads were utilizing Macromedia Flash files to upload an invisible iFrame which pulls down a code to breach a security hole in IE.

Although there are browser tools available like a “no-script” add-on that could prevent this programming code from running when triggered during browsing activities, unfortunately, IE browser doesn’t employ those kind of tools.

The best way to prevent virus attacks such as this is to ensure that Internet Explorer security patches are up to date.

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 5:37 pm under Advertising, Malware.

Read more entries by Arnold Zafra.
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