Visitors to Wikipedia who see advertisements on the site have mostlikely fallen victim to a browser-based malware infection,Wikimedia Foundation, the organization operating the website, saidon Monday. "We never run ads on Wikipedia," said Philippe Beaudette, directorof community advocacy for the Wikimedia Foundation, in a blog post . "If you're seeing advertisements for a for-profit industry ... oranything but our fundraiser, then your web browser has likely beeninfected with malware." [ Learn how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Malware Deep Dive PDF special report and Security Central newsletter , both from InfoWorld. ] One example of such malware is a rogue Google Chrome extensioncalled "I want this," Beaudette said.
However, similar maliciousadd-ons might also exist for Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer,and other browsers, he said. This type of malicious software is known as click fraud malware andcan target multiple websites at once. In addition to injecting adsinto Web pages, such rogue extensions are also known to hijacksearch queries in order to earn their creators affiliate revenue,said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, in a blog post Tuesday. Spotting this type of rogue behavior on Wikipedia is easier than onother websites because the site doesn't run any commercialadvertisements. "We're here to distribute the sum of humanknowledge to everyone on the planet -- ad-free, forever," Beaudettesaid.
Wikipedia's operating costs are covered by donations. An onlinefundraiser is organized every year, and that's usually the onlytime a banner is displayed on the site's pages. Users who are seeing commercial ads on Wikipedia should disable alltheir browser add-ons to determine if they are the source of theproblem, Beaudette said. Even if this makes the ads disappear, however, it is notnecessarily a permanent solution and does not fix the underlyingissue.
The malware might have other components running on thesystem that could reinfect the browser. "Run an up-to-date anti-virus to make sure that whatever might haveintroduced the unwanted ads isn't also up to other maliciousbehavior behind the scenes," Cluley wrote. If disabling the browser add-ons and running an antivirus scan doesnot solve the issue, it's likely that the ads are automaticallybeing injected into Web sessions at the network level. SomeInternet caf s and free Wi-Fi providers are in the habit of doingthis, Beaudette said.
Visiting the affected website over HTTPS (HTTP Secure) mightsometimes remove the rogue ads, because HTTPS sessions areencrypted. There are browser extensions like the ElectronicFrontier Foundation's HTTPS Everywhere that enable HTTPS by defaulton websites that support it. I am a professional writer from Automobiles & Motorcycles, which contains a great deal of information about mac g5 quad , compaq evo 510, welcome to visit!
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