Ask Marian

[#1]

 When I get on the computer each day I have a number of standard websites I check before I get into email, projects or meetings. You likely have your own, perhaps one set for the work day and others for leisure time. My prime targets include news, technology, government and parenting sites. Most of them are managed by large corporations with IT departments and staff dedicated to securing the site and designing a positive user experience. Still, I find it jarring how often the edges of any webpage are littered with junk advertising. The ones that bug me most are the dancing girls of mortgage ads, the anti-aging skin care fright mask images, or anything strobing or flashing at me.  Dan Neil of The Los Angeles Times calls them "punch the monkey" ads.

These trashy ads bug me for more than the distracting effect they have. Many of them are ads designed to trick consumers into falling for scams or misleading offers. And as such, they are often attractive to children who truly think they will "click on the iPod and WIN!" or learn their true IQ from taking the quiz. Some of these ads are fronts for criminal scammers, where clicking the ad or visiting their site will allow the crook to download malicious programs onto your computer. In Neil's article today he claims that the cheesiest examples of these trashy ads are on the decline as websites aim to clean up their sites and improve their brand impressions.

In another story, a mainstream website was duped by cybercriminals into accepting scam ads by sophisticated crooks who knew the industry lingo and could spoof a real world ad agency and client. The malicious ads appeared on Gawker.com, supposedly for Suzuki cars. Clicking on those ads could serve up Adobe exploits or scareware, the kind of fake antivirus problem that Symantec recently reported on.

It's not obvious to any typical website visitor how sites pick their ad partners or who is controlling access to our eyeballs. But a quick spin through my usual "go to" sites seems to confirm Neil's premise; that the worst ads are on the wane. And that's good news to the security industry as well as for parents everywhere. Since as bad as it is for one of us to fall for an online scam, it is worse when our kids do. Often, they won't admit it or even realize they did something wrong, which prevents us from taking steps to minimize the harm. Those steps would include regularly checking credit card statements and credit reports for unusual activity and updating security software, operating system and browsers and scanning for evidence of spyware on the computer.