StopBadware Saves Christmas

Posted by Jason Callina Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:50:00 GMT

“Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say, ‘StopBadware, with all your might, help me find the badware on my site.’”

This week we received one of our more interesting calls for help. A website owner, who is legally named Santa Claus, came to us wondering why in the world his site had been submitted to us for review and was being filtered by Google. He had consulted local experts, which we can only assume were elves, but they were unable to identify anything wrong with his site. Away to our research tools we flew like a flash, and with some quick analysis we knew there was much to dread. (I know I should have tried harder to rhyme in this paragraph, but I think you get the point). We noticed right away that nestled all snug in the bottom of his homepage was a nice little bit of code containing a badware link—specifically, an iframe that would attempt to install badware onto visitors’ computers via a javascript exploit.

Santa was disconcerted, but glad that he wasn’t incorrectly flagged. He and his crackerjack team of pointy-eared friends have since removed the offending link from his site and the workshop is once again a safe place to be. The moral of the story is that the Grinches who are looking to spread their unsafe software are willing to hack even Santa’s website, and if you are going to surf the internet make sure you have your anti-virus and anti-badware software up-to-date because it can get pretty stormy out there.