NOTICE BY KEN RODE, Director of IT Services at UNAPEN, Inc.

Yet another major case of “malvertising” has been reported.  This is nothing new (a famous case occurred on the NY times web site over 5 years ago).  This sort of hacker attack works by going after the companies who serve up advertisements to sites such as newspapers, fantasy sport sites, yahoo, msn, match.com, etc.  If your browser plugins are not up to date, simply opening a page that is showing one of these infected ads can automatically infect your computer.

This latest occurrence was serving up the “CryptoWall” malware.  This little gem encrypts all your documents, pictures, music, etc. and holds it all hostage until you pay the ransom to get the data unencrypted.

To protect yourself from this type of attack, it is critical to ensure you keep all your plugins up to date.  This includes, Flash Player, Java, Adobe Acrobat and any other browser add-ins you may have installed.

Read the PC World article here.

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