Banner Ads Now Attack You

Here's an interesting twist that shouldn't come as a surprise. A web security company, ScanSafe, noticed an increase in banner ads with malware planted on common social networking sites, like MySpace, according to a report this week in SC Magazine.

The banner code looks for a recently patched ActiveX exploit, and then drops Trojans on the user's desktop without any user interaction. So, just visiting an affected site, without even clicking on the banner, starts the attack on your machine.

Patched browsers are protected from the Trojan downloader called VBS.Agent.n.

Keep your patches current is the best advice.