Advertising firms struggle to kill malvertisements

In late September, advertisements appearing on a host of popular news and entertainment sites began serving up malicious code, infecting some visitors' computers with a backdoor program designed to gather information on their systems and install additional malicious code.

The attack affected visitors to The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The Hindustan Times, Internet music service Last.fm, and India-focused movie portal Bollywood Hungama, among other popular sites. At the center of the malware campaign: the compromise of San Francisco-based Internet advertising network Zedo, an advertising provider for the sites, whose network was then used to distribute malicious ads.

For ten days, the company investigated multiple malware reports, retracing the attacker's digital footsteps to identify the malicious files and shut the backdoor to its systems.

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