Latvian Hackers Target Star Tribune

Turns out one of our local papers, The Star Tribune got hacked via classified ad - from Latvia (with love?)! Read this FBI press release, including:

According to the indictment, the defendants created a phony advertising agency and claimed that they represented a hotel chain that wanted to purchase online advertising space on the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s news website, startribune.com. The defendants provided an electronic version of the advertisement for the hotel chain to the Star Tribune, and technical staff at startribune.com tested the advertising and found it to operate normally.
According to court documents, after the advertisement began running on the website, the defendants changed the computer code in the ad so that the computers of visitors to the startribune.com were infected with a malicious software program that launched scareware on their systems. The scareware caused users’ computers to “freeze up” and then generate a series of pop-up warnings in an attempt to trick users into purchasing purported “antivirus” software, which was in fact fake.

I’m going to bookmark this one so I can refer people back to it when they ask, “how could I have gotten infected with this? I didn't open any e-mail or go on any weird sites!” Malware is everywhere . . . eternal vigilance!