Well done Kaspersky
"An update to Kaspersky's popular anti-virus software on Monday falsely identified Google Adsense as a malicious script."
Falsely identified? It IS malicious.
Couldn't resist.
An update to Kaspersky's popular anti-virus software on Monday falsely identified Google AdSense as a malicious script. As a result of the false alarm, Kaspersky users visiting sites in Google ad syndication network were falsely warned a site was infected with malicious Trojan-linked JavaScript. Network admins, swamped with …
This has little to do with this story, but I didn't know where else to raise this pressing issue.
Please, for the love of gawd, would El Reg remove the Google Chrome OS Coding story from the front page? It's been there over a month now, and that cheesy photo of the uber-googlers Page & Brin has gone from being risible, to nauseating, to doing evil of global proportions.
Please! Have pity.
For some reason, I don't see this as a problem...
Let me explain: a webmaster decides to include a remote, third party piece of javascript on their page (or commonly an entire site). That javascript COULD do absolutely anything, including XSS exploits, cookie/login-info stealing, etc, etc. Just because a company's motto is "do no evil", doesn't mean that they won't.
Also consider the impact of someone hijacking that domain... maybe just your local DNS settings... they'd have full access to all of the actions that you do on any site implementing this third-party system.
Sound like a good idea to you?
There's a reason it's blocked in my DNS server and my router.
So, kaspersky were probably right in this case.
Just because something is popular, doesn't make it right.
/rant
There are a lot of things that Google, in its many flavors, does with scripts, dynamic links, etc. that are much the same as that done by malware. Malware routinely uses Google facilities as attack vectors, making it even harder to tell the difference.
Have you looked recently at the Google home page sources? Or looked closely at the scripts used to present ads and to track visitors?
"Flagging Windows systems files as potentially infected and shuffling them off to quarantine" is a good idea, not because they are infected but just because Windows is a bloated, badly designed security nightmare.
If the system isn't infected by 3rd party malware then it's going to be infected by the Winblows operating system iteself which has spread from machine to machine in the last 20 years like an electronic version of genital herpes.
Paris - as far as we know, she takes her own precautions against infections
bit.ly offers a URL redirection service, allowing anyone to provide a short URL to any site. If someone decided to use bit.ly to redirect to a site containing malware, it is easy to see how both Kaspersky and F-secure might put bit.ly in their shit list for a while. Perhaps it would be better if advertisers used their own domains and not hide behind URL redirectors.
I had one of these alarms from Kaspersky yesterday - but only one. I guess the next update fixed the issue.