Sponsored search results at major search engines can lead to malware

[Clint1]

FYI.......

The ads served by Bing and Google along with your search results are linking more and more often to sites trying to infect your machine.

Neither Bing nor Google effectively prescreens these bogus advertisers, so it's up to us to detect and avoid them.

You may recently have used either Google or Microsoft's new Bing search engine to find the popular Malwarebytes Anti-Malware utility. If so, chances are good that the sponsored ads alongside your search results contained links to the very malware that the security tool is designed to remove.

Full story here:
Sponsored search results lead to malware

[chrisJumbo]

Clint, thanks for the helpful article.

I finally switched to FF, just because the browser isn't attacked as often. However, I think my computer was infected by either a flash ad or my daughter accidently clicked a malicious ad.

I ended up having to get a new harddrive. It was old, and the extra spinning from the malicious code finally did it in.

cd :O)

[Clint1]

Originally Posted by chrisJumbo

Clint, thanks for the helpful article.

Welcome (and thanks for the +).

I finally switched to FF, just because the browser isn't attacked as often.

Yeah.....as least not so far.

However, I think my computer was infected by either a flash ad or my daughter accidently clicked a malicious ad.

I of course don't know what you know about this sort of thing, but this post may be timely.

I ended up having to get a new harddrive. It was old, and the extra spinning from the malicious code finally did it in.

Wow, that would be a helluvalot of spinning. Decent HD's should be able to run 24/7 with no problem. If it was making any unusual noise, it could have been that malware that causes the "click of death" HD failure, I forget the name.

[deepsand]

This has been going on for some time. And, it's not only ad links which may be dangerous, but organic ones as well.

For months now, I've been getting Google Alerts re. indexed items which lead to poisoned sites.