DANGER! Whitepages.com may be displaying malicious advertisements

Note this incident is as yet unconfirmed.  Report received via email:

UPDATE: THE REPORT HAS BEEN CONFIRMED - PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN VISITING WHITEPAGES.COM:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2007/08/22/1129296.aspx

DO NOT VISIT THE URLS PROVIDED!!! YOU MAY INFECT YOUR SYSTEM

"we often use whitepages.com in our work, going as far as leaving it open all day. starting yesterday our virus scanners noted several attempted malware installations. They appear to be coming from a banner ad that is in rotation. The address of the ad itself is hXXp:// hotest-tgp-pics.com / ?id= booker and that redirects to other pages that attempt to autoinstall the malware without user intervention. the 2 sites I have seen so far are hxxp:// scanner.malwarealarm.com /5/?advid= 1500 and hxxp:// scanner.spy-shredder.com /4/? advid= 1553. I sent an email to abuse@whitepages.com and webmaster@whitepages.com but have not yet received a response."

Published Wed, Aug 22 2007 8:48 by sandi
Filed under: , , ,

Comments

# re: DANGER! Whitepages.com may be displaying malicious advertisements

Tuesday, August 21, 2007 11:14 PM by Seth Crosby

Yup, just happened to me now.  Whitepages.com is not safe.

# re: DANGER! Whitepages.com may be displaying malicious advertisements

Wednesday, August 22, 2007 1:00 AM by sandi

@ Seth

whitepages.com have been informed and have responded to the alert email. They've also been given my details so that they can get in touch if they require assistance tracking down the rogue advertisements.

# re: DANGER! Whitepages.com may be displaying malicious advertisements

Sunday, October 07, 2007 12:36 PM by Gary

Some time has gone by now.  scanner.spy-shredder.com/4 still says "Affiliate account has been blocked".  The offending ad account was evidently removed from the pool by that particular advertising service whitepages.com subscribes to.  

The ads allow an otherwise expensive service to be free to us.  

Those advertising services are the real source of the offending ActiveX advertiser ever propogating out to the world through them, how could we identify and establish a dialog with the ad agency directly, rather than one of their customers (customers like whitepages.com).

Thanks for your efforts.