Dive summary:
- Internet advertising network NetSeer suffered a hack to the front-end website yesterday which caused Google Chrome to flag the website as infected with malware thus causing sites hosting a NetSeer ad to show a malware warning.
- These warnings were a glitch as the websites hosting NetSeer ads were not directly affected by the hack and contained no malware.
- Many major news sites were affected including The New York Times, ZDNet, Huffington Post, and The Street, and the Guardian, but NetSeer has a team working quickly to rectify the situation and most sites should be working normally.
From the article:
"A NetSeer spokesperson confirmed that its corporate network had been infected with malware, and Google subsequently added its domain to a list of malware-affected Websites. Because NetSeer's corporate site has the same domain name as its advertising network, Google triggered warnings on end-user machines warning users to avoid any Web page that happened to include an ad served from NetSeer's servers.
But, visitors to these Web pages were not at risk of being served up malware from the NetSeer advertising network, the company said."