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Drudge Report Alleged of Distributing Malware

Visitors to the news website Drudge Report claim that alongwith the website's usual breathtaking headlines, they received malware.

On March 8, 2010, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (US) sent an e-mail to congressional staffers, cautioning that they should avoid visiting drudgereport.com, which is allegedly responsible for several viruses bothering the Senate.

The e-mail from the committee stated, "Please avoid using these sites until the Senate resolves this issue. The Senate has been swamped the last couple of days with this issue".

The official mail cautioning the committee evolved from its non-partisan systems administrator after the Senate Help Desk had talked about a rise in the amount of virus infections in Senate systems.

But the Drudge Report immediately responded, blaming the Senate of a politically motivated restriction and turned down all claims regarding the distribution of viruses via their website. As per the news site, no complaints were there regarding pop-up problems or viruses, for over 29 Million webpages served by the website on March 8, 2010.

Author and editor of the Drudge Report, Matt Drudge, however rejected the claims of his site serving users with malware, but he expressed the possibility of a third-party ad network distributing the malware, reported by cnet news on March 9, 2010.

The security experts opined that it can be that the malware infiltrated the website through an ad. Several sites outsource the serving of their ads and ad networks have been in the business of delivering malware to websites since 2009, targeting several well-known websites like The New York Times that was hit in 2009.

Moreover, it is to be noted that the Drudge Report has not been found indulged in serving malware to govt. websites for the first time. Earlier, in September 2009, Massachusetts-based US Attorney's office advised employees to remain away from the Drudge website. In that case, the ads distributed a variant of Win32/Alureon Trojan that facilitates other malware to download on the computer.

Related article: Doritos E-mail Scam Creating Huge Problems for Frito-Lay

» SPAMfighter News - 3/17/2010

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