Response to blog posts about Myspace spyware installs
January 27th, 2007
As the person responsible at Right Media for ensuring that active-x/viruses don’t hit the Right Media exchange I thought it’d be appropriate to respond to Sandi Hardmeier’s blogpost that claims Right Media is responsible for Myspace running ads that attempt to install Spyware. You can find the post here: http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2007/01/27/523217.aspx
First — simply because delb.myspace.com (myspace’s adserver) sometimes redirects to ad.yieldmanager.com (our adserver) doesn’t mean that this came from us. As you may have noticed, you will also see ads from many different ad networks. I’m not trying to point blame elsewhere, but it’s impossible to say who caused this without actual referring urls from the end users. This is an industry-wide problem, and please see the links below for more info on both how clever these spyware providers can be and what’s being done about it.
Second — We have been working extremely hard on stopping this behavior from ever occuring on the Right Media Exchange. We have an automated auditing tool that checks our ads 24/7 for behavior such as this. Over the past 3 months we have shut down hundreds of ads that try to do active-x installs and even a couple parties that attempted to spread viruses using ad networks. Please check out the following articles from our blog for more info:
http://blog.rightmedia.com/2007/01/27/banner-ops-and-errorsafe/
http://blog.rightmedia.com/2006/08/02/Two-Viruses-Ten-Creatives-and-an-Automated-Creative-Tester/
http://blog.rightmedia.com/2006/08/30/how-media-guard-works/
Please email me at mnolet@rightmedia.com if you have any additional questions.
-Mike
January 27th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
[…] Original post by Michiel Nolet for Myspace News Response to blog posts about Myspace spyware installs […]
January 27th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
I also saw Winfixer malware advertisements from Right Media being served up to Messenger Plus! sponsor programs via Circle Distribution.
Frankly, your “automated auditing tool” is not working.
Patchou of Messenger Plus! and CiD ended up ending every Sponsor Program users’ HOSTS file to block known Winfixer domains completely - so why can’t *you* do that at your end?
January 27th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
That should be “ended up *editing* every Sponsor Program users’ HOSTS file”
June 13th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
my spyware program tells me its a malicious resource, microsoft website says the same, sure they want to attach themselves to your keystroking etc.!!!!!!!!!!