News - Popular technology blog falls foul of malware scam

[HEXUS]

Technology blog Gizmodo has warned that it may have passed on malware to its readers.

Read more.

[matty-hodgson]

well at least they owned up to it and gave their readers some information about the malware..

[Singh400]

Classic. At least they owned up and warned their readers asap.

[Vimeous]

The positive is they warned peeps and appologised.
The negative is they don't run the same dev environment as their users.

/rant mode on

I've always been taught the cardinal sin of programming anything is to run and test on anything other than what your key users operate. It doesn't matter what is better, more secure or more convienient, what matters is what you users see and interact with.
Despite the tech world's love of Mozilla-based browsers, "virus-proof Linux" and other conciets the fact remains that at present most users of publically consumable web-media use the most popular browser. That alone should have it at the heart of any web-dev setup.

I hope this event is of high-enough profile to remind web-devs in particular they don't develop for themselves - they do it for their users - even if your sites raison d'etre is to extol the virtues of better, more secure solutions.

/rant mode off

.....

/rant restart

Just re-read the piece again.
"Be careful, load up some antivirus and make sure your system is clean. I'm sorry."
WHAT?!
Ok the "I'm sorry" I can understand and no doubt it's sincere but the off-the-cuff AV comment really irks me.
"Some antivirus"? You mean you expect people not to have any?
WHICH ONE?!
Many of these cunning scams aren't successfully dealt with by a swathe of modern AV-systems let alone older products that many still use but keep up-to-date thinking that's enough. Two friends this week have been caught out by similar scams while running supposedly up-to-date AV from well-regarded vendors.

Maybe it'd be useful to give advice to those who may have been affected? After all, being a techie-site I'd expect them to be able to find a good solution much faster than many of the users, in particular those most likely affected by the scam in the first place!
Grr

/rant over ..... methinks


Appologies.
It's the scammers that get to me most because I end up having to deal with their fallout and in one case advise a friend to change their bank-account details asap. I hate giving bad news like that because it severely tarnishes what is one of the most influential medias of our time.
That this has happened doesn't surprise me. What does is the short-sightedness that allowed it to reach this point.

*sighs*

Until the next time ........

[NuShuttle]

RSS readers are your best friend