MySpace has engaged in its fair share of fights over the past
few months, battling alleged spammers and fending off lawsuits. Now
we're hearing an allegation that the social networking site has
been serving ads that hock pesky programs known as "scareware." And
rather than call out the big guns, the social networking site is
rolling over and playing dead.
James Kingsley, a PhD student in the UK city of Sheffield, said his
wife encountered ads on Monday while tending to her MySpace
account. The insult, he said, extended to repeated attempts by one
of the advertised parasites to install the program using
ActiveX.
"That's the thing that really struck me as being malicious,"
Kingsley told us. "Although my wife is pretty skeptical about these
things my mom wouldn't be."
The two pieces of offending software, Kingsley said, included
WinAntiVirus Pro and DriveCleaner, and he included screen shots -
posted here - that appeared to back up his claim. One shot also
appears to show a warning from Internet Explorer that
winantivirus.com was trying to install a program.
Security companies have issued warnings about both programs.
Sophos, for instance, says WinAntiVirus loads a
"spyware detection installer application which downloads
applications that may exaggerate threats on a user's computer and
ask user to buy software to remove these threats." Indeed, using
Google to search for "winantivirus" and clicking on site associated
with the product results in a rather terse warning that "visiting
this web site may harm your computer!"
The same warning happens for DriveCleaner, which Symantec describes as "a security assessment
tool which gives exaggerated reports of security and privacy risks
on a computer."
MySpace, after promising on Monday to look into Kingsley's report,
failed to respond to the half-dozen emails and phone calls we left
over the past two days. We were unable to locate the maker or
makers of WinAntiVirus and DriveCleaner for comment.
So we are appealing to you, our esteemed readers, to relate any
instances of MySpace or other mainstream sites serving naughty ads.
Please contact your reporter at the link above.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/24/myspace_accusation/