Beware humans bearing gifts.

newscientist.com

9 points·eastlinkage··10 comments

This is not the first New Scientist article in recent days to attract a lot of comments of the form "I went there and got sent to a site that sells fraudulent antimalware".

New Scientist itself is certainly not in that business. newscientist.com is certainly New Scientist's website. So either they, or some DNS server(s) somewhere, have been compromised. (Where I count accepting an advertisement whose effect is to redirect visitors to a fraud site as being compromised.)

The link must have been fixed in the meantime - I didn't have any trouble.

Perhaps a DNS attack? Try 194.203.155.123/article/mg20427391.400-beware-humans-bearing-gifts.html

yep - tried to trick me into installing 'anti-malware'. Please remove the link!

There's definitely something wrong with this link.

I got redirected to a site that "scanned" my C drive, found 431 viruses and trojans including some MS Word vulnerabilities and offered (once every 5 seconds or so) to download a .exe file that would supposedly fix everything. I was running Linux.

Beware humans bearing gifts indeed.

I got to the proper New Scientist article. Maybe it was just an exploitive ad that they've gotten rid of now.

The second time I went in I got to the New Scientist article as well. It's probably fixed now.

nope, i just got the same "virus scanning" link. maybe it only appears on the first click. regardless, this post should be deleted.

SPAM

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