ANTenna Blog -- Security

This weekend's eruption of popup antivirus scam ads on The New York Times site offers a couple of opportunities, the most important of which is to remind your employees of the increasing aggressiveness of rogue antivirus malware.

If you haven't seen a rogue antivirus popoup ad -- whether on the Times site or elsewhere -- you're one of the lucky ones.

Scam works like this: You visit a page -- a New York Times page this weekend, say -- and up pops a warning that your computer is infected with malware, along with the offer (pretty insistently) that you download and run a free antivirus scan immediately.

Of course the popup is illegitimate, and instead of a scan you get a scam, with rogue crimeware installed on your machine instead of antivirus software.

As the Times noted this weekend, the antivirus scammers hit their site hard, driving popups by way of an "unauthorized advertisement."

But the Times is only the latest -- and most high profile -- site to suffer from the aggressive "marketing" of rogue antivirus ads.

Because the number of rogue antivirus scams is increasing so dramatically and quickly, it's vital that all of your employees who are on the Web understand that in the case of popup virus warning appearing they should

CLOSE THE BROWSER IMMEDIATELY.

Not just one tab or window, and absolutely not the popup itself.

The entire browser must be closed and restarted.

Pass the word: the popups are popping up everywhere, and odds are the situation's going to get worse.

The Times's advice on dealing with the popups is here.