Oh happy day, it would appear that a major banner advertising company has been spreading naughty programs via an Internet Explorer exploit, it would appear that they were hacked, along with Comedy Central, and the exploit added to their advertising banners.

Basically if you’ve been using Internet Exploder, sorry, Explorer to view websites under Windows and you are not running Windows XP SP2 then you may well have been infected with either annoying advertising software or with a trojan. Oh, and apparently there is also an exploit circulating for SP2 too now. 🙁

Use Firefox instead – it’s not only more secure, it works better!

You can read the Internet Storm Center’s wrapup report which contains the damning message that:

We have not mentioned the potential damage to Microsoft’s reputation but that also must be taken into consideration when you consider that except for WinXP SP2, the Internet Explorer has no patch for this vulnerability. It will come back again to visit more unprotected sites.

There is an excellent explanation of the attack by LURHQ Managed Security Services.