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Monday, November 22, 2004
Hacker Exploit Spreads Virus Through Banner Ads
Hackers planted a version of the Bofra virus in banner ads served through dozens of Web sites over the weekend.
The malware exploited a vulerability in Internet Explorer that was announced earlier this month; Microsoft says a fix is more than two weeks away.
Hackers used banner ads to launch a widespread attack in Europe over the weekend. The hackers apparently broke into a that delivers banner ads for Germany’s Falk eSolutions and loaded malicious code on banner advertising that appeared on hundreds of Web sites. “Early Saturday morning an unauthorized individual exploited a weakness in a load balancer on the European AdSolution network.” The purpose of the exploit was to establish a redirect to malicious code through a javascript component of Falk’s ad delivery.
The malware exploits the Bofra/IFRAME vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which was announced earlier this month. Systems that have been upgraded to Windows XP Service Pack 2 reportedly are not affected.
“In total, potential redirects to this exploit code represented less then 2 percent of EU ad requests and under 0.1 percent of U.S. ad requests during this time period,” Falk eSolutions says in a notice on its site.
GMT, the virus was removed from all Falk European and U.S. networks, and normal ad delivery was restored,” the company says.