Tuesday, March 27, 2007

AOL and Winfixer.. the malware advertisements should be gone.. for now

Bravo, Sandi!

A contact at Microsoft put me in touch with the appropriate people at AOL this morning - an advertising tech lead and a gentleman involved in policy and compliance. Thanks to a network capture that I gave to AOL they were finally able to track down the rogue advertiser who had infiltrated the AOL ad network to serve up winfixer malware advertisements and shut the ads down.

Once the guys at AOL and I actually hooked up, it only took a few hours to get the account shut down. Damned if I know why it took so long for us to connect, but it did.

AOL's official statement on the incident is:

"We use a wide range of technical and policy measures to prevent malware distributors from placing advertisements on our networks, but apparently one was able to circumvent those measures. We have blocked this ad campaign and [are] working with our technical and legal teams to take additional steps to block similar issues in future."


See the full story here.

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