The Independent's blog site has been exposed to hackers who target visitors who come to the site and demands ransoms. As a precaution, the website has taken down all advertisements and all third party advertising suppliers are currently being investigated. There is a theory that it may have been an advert that may have included malware however, there is no evidence to support this. If this theory was true, the malware would only affect those who do not have the most up to date flash software. There have been several other instances where adverts have been used for hackers to hack into websites. An example of this was in October, Mail Online were briefly exposed to adverts that linked to malware.
- The malware threat was first highlighted on a blog run by internet security firm Trend Micro
- people visiting affected pages on Independent Blogs since 21 November could have been exposed to the malware.
- ESI said that visitors to the legacy site amounted to less than 0.2% of those who visited the Independent during the whole month of November.
- fewer than 5,000 people a day are likely to have visited the site
Having such things happen to a well known institution may cause audiences to lose trust in The Independent and rely on other news providers. However, it can also be interpreted that if The Independent can be viable to malware, like stated in the article, other news providers could have similar issues, this means that the only thing that institutions such as The Independent should be more wary of situations such as this and only accept trustworthy, third party ad suppliers.
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