Comments on: view ads, get owned? http://blog.ebrahim.org/2004/11/22/view-ads-get-owned/ Ali Ebrahim on web standards, software developement, technology, politics and law. Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:26:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Laurens Holst http://blog.ebrahim.org/2004/11/22/view-ads-get-owned/comment-page-1/#comment-260 Laurens Holst Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:29:20 +0000 http://blog.ebrahim.org/2004/11/22/view-ads-get-owned/#comment-260 Popular news portal nu.nl (which we almost linked to in the Dutch Firefox translation, but we chose another news site instead) is also from the Ilse company. ~Grauw Popular news portal nu.nl (which we almost linked to in the Dutch Firefox translation, but we chose another news site instead) is also from the Ilse company.

~Grauw

]]> By: Laurens Holst http://blog.ebrahim.org/2004/11/22/view-ads-get-owned/comment-page-1/#comment-259 Laurens Holst Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:27:49 +0000 http://blog.ebrahim.org/2004/11/22/view-ads-get-owned/#comment-259 By the way, Ilse is also the owner of the very popular Dutch search engine <a href="http://ilse.nl/" rel="nofollow">http://ilse.nl/</a> . Yep, whoever spread this virus is one nasty hacker. I think millions of people are affected. By the way, Ilse is also the owner of the very popular Dutch search engine http://ilse.nl/ .

Yep, whoever spread this virus is one nasty hacker. I think millions of people are affected.

]]> By: Laurens Holst http://blog.ebrahim.org/2004/11/22/view-ads-get-owned/comment-page-1/#comment-258 Laurens Holst Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:25:14 +0000 http://blog.ebrahim.org/2004/11/22/view-ads-get-owned/#comment-258 The Dutch sites from the company Ilse have been hit by the same problem: <a href="http://www.startpagina.nl/alert/" rel="nofollow">http://www.startpagina.nl/alert/</a> This includes www.startpagina.nl, a portal site which is used by many as a start page (as the name suggests). Now if you see that even on a technical site like w3schools the share of Windows OS-es older than Windows XP is 30% (I'd say for non-technical sites this is closer to 50%), and probably only half of the people having Windows XP have actually upgraded it to SP2... Of course the virus was only shown to people about every 30 pages, but if you browse around on a page you can reach that number quite quickly, and the same goes for people having the page as a startpage which loads it every time you open a new browser window. My estimate is that about 50% of the people using startpagina.nl have been infected with this virus now. Sad as it may be, maybe this will make people finally realize that keeping your OS up-to-date is really important, and moreover that Internet Explorer is a bug-ridden creature which leaves you vulnerable, even if you don't visit dubious warez sites or something. A good alternative is of course Firefox :). ~Grauw The Dutch sites from the company Ilse have been hit by the same problem:

http://www.startpagina.nl/alert/

This includes http://www.startpagina.nl, a portal site which is used by many as a start page (as the name suggests). Now if you see that even on a technical site like w3schools the share of Windows OS-es older than Windows XP is 30% (I’d say for non-technical sites this is closer to 50%), and probably only half of the people having Windows XP have actually upgraded it to SP2…

Of course the virus was only shown to people about every 30 pages, but if you browse around on a page you can reach that number quite quickly, and the same goes for people having the page as a startpage which loads it every time you open a new browser window.

My estimate is that about 50% of the people using startpagina.nl have been infected with this virus now.

Sad as it may be, maybe this will make people finally realize that keeping your OS up-to-date is really important, and moreover that Internet Explorer is a bug-ridden creature which leaves you vulnerable, even if you don’t visit dubious warez sites or something. A good alternative is of course Firefox :) .

~Grauw

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