Philly.com sports portal possibly hit with malware attack
Visitors to Philly.com's sports section saw this malware warning in Safari this morning
Updated, 3:20 p.m.: According to a statement from Philly.com, the site has confirmed that a widget on the site contains code that is “not recognized by Google,” and was thus misinterpreted as malicious code. It hopes Google will remove the “malware” warning soon. “We do know that it was that code, we found the code that Google was flagging and it is a third-party widget on the site. We are working with that vendor to get that widget back up,” Editor and Vice President Wendy Warren said in an interview.
Philly.com‘s sports portal is appearing in Google search results and in browser notification systems as a site infected by potentially malicious malware, possibly caused by the site’s Flash-based advertisements.
Vice President and Editor Wendy Warren told Technically Philly that the organization is “responding very aggressively” to investigate the situation and that it is possible that code on the site might be being misinterpreted as malicious.
Warren said in a telephone interview this afternoon that there had been no reports that harmful software had been installed on user computers.
“We’re not sure if there was malicious code or not. Though we can’t rule it out yet, we’ve not found any evidence of it,” she says. “We’re going to check every piece of code that we haven’t written ourselves.”
Philly.com site administrators have disabled Flash-based advertisements and third-party widgets in the Sports section, where the malicious code has been found, Warren says. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly has conducted business with Warren and Philly.com]
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