Malvertising - Is No April Fool

On Monday, the government launched StartUp Britain with a website designed to champion the UK's start-up businesses, unfortunately it has also inadvertently linked users to malware.

The government-backed website has been linked to a page hosting fake anti-virus programs according to security firm Sophos.  Whilst it has caused some embarrassment to the widely promoted government scheme, the link was removed shortly after launch, according to StartUp Britain.

However, the glitch has highlighted a growing problem for businesses called “malvertising”. 

In this case users were taken to a third party website, redirected to a fake anti-virus page and were given a prompt saying their computer had been infected and thus encouraged them to download a fix.  The fix, in fact contained malware.

Last month, the London Stock Exchange hosted booby-trapped adverts that asked visitors to download similar fake security software.   This week, music streaming service Spotify was forced to apologise after 'malverts' were served to some of its users.