NetSeer Hacked, Corporate Servers Infected With Malware

The Internet has been facing some serious security threats recently, it all started with the news of the New York Times being hacked by the Chinese, then the Wall Street Journal, then Twitter, then the Department of Energy, and now NetSeer.  If you’re not familiar with NetSeer that’s most likely because you never see their technology, but rather, you see the ads it serves.  Websites such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Huffington Post all rely on NetSeer’s ad serving technology so when NetSeer was hacked early Monday morning (approximately 5:30AM PST), many people who use Google Chrome were warned that visting a site that uses NetSeer’s ad technology could be harmful to their computer.

It didn’t take long for NetSeer to notice the problem as it went into damage control mode and removed the malware from its servers.  By 9:30AM PST NetSeer was no longer listed as a malware site by Google (thanks to an expedited review) and all was well in the universe.  It’s worth noting that NetSeer’s corporate servers are completely separate from its ad serving infrastructure so no one was ever really in harm’s way.

Our ad serving infrastructure is completely different from the corporate website but shares the same domain (netseer.com). So although the malware never impacted the ad serving all our ad serving partners saw Chrome and other browsers flagging malware warnings to users.

If your site uses NetSeer and you removed their code, you can now safely add it back.

(Via MajorGeeks.)