kahunaburger

And I always thought that you can still trust some things out there, like surfing “safe” sites and not having to be afraid that some Trojan is trying to make it onto your system. I guess that isn’t true any more.
When I was scanning through my RSS-feeds in FeedDemon (see http://www.feeddemon.com/) this morning, I stumbled across a Wired-item that seemed interesting. I clicked on the link for Lightning Takes a Holiday and saw the story render in the embedded IE control inside FeedDemon. A second later I also saw McAfee VirusScan pop up the message below:

So the Wired news page had triggered the Virusscan warnings and the McAfee application was nice enough to remove the offending files from my system before the Trojan could start it’s work.
Interestingly enough, the source for the problem is not on the Wired news page itself, but it is in the ads that are served on this page. I tracked it down to the “Weight Loss Patch” ad at the top, which was included via IFRAME from adserver.com (which happens to be part of the FastClick network).

Great – now you can’t even trust old-timers any more. Time to switch off active scripting and to follow Nick’s information on how to make Mozilla your browser engine inside FeedDemon – see here.