For the past two days when I've gone to the New York Times website, www.nytimes.com, I've been getting these pop-ups that say "Your computer may be infected with a virus, download a free scan now" or some such message. If you hit the "No thanks" button, it begins to run a fake scan on your system anyway! If this happens, close your browser immediately, and by no means should you run this bogus scan, because what it is really doing is inserting a trojan into your PC (don't know if Macs are similarly affected).

I wasn't really sure what the deal was until I read this just now:

Here's a front page story the New York Times (NYT) would rather not be running: The paper is warning readers to be aware of  bogus ads running on its Web site.

The paper says "some readers" have seen unauthorized pop-up ads promoting antivirus software on NYTimes.com, and warns visitors who see the ad not to click on it but to restart their browsers instead. While the Times doesn't spell this out, it has likely had its site hijacked by a "malware" scammer who is trying to trick visitors into installing pernicious software onto their hard drives.

The complete article can be read here:

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090913/home-delivery-the-new-york-times-serves-up-some-malware/

It appears that the TImes had been made aware of this and is now warning readers about it on their front page.

In other news...hello to everyone from the chatroom the other night during Obama's health care speech (big fun!). It's been awhile since I've had time to blog, so it was nice to be in touch with all of you.

Cheers,

astral66