Before going into this story, I have to admit that I have a low opinion of our local NBC affiliate to begin with. I tended to call them the “Shiny Things News Broadcast”, because of their emphasis on bright shiny graphics and little actual journalism content. In any event, I simply avoid them whenever possible. This afternoon, though, they managed to cause my opinion of them to drop even lower.
I got called into the administrative assistant’s office, to take a look at her screen. I walked in, and saw a popup from a site advertising something called DriveCleaner. She had tried to go to Channel 2’s website, and the popup had come up. She tried to click it closed, but we clicked the wrong part of the window and it tried to run a false drive scan. We closed it, and it attempted to force a download of the DriveCleaner installer. Fortunately, our proxy server blocked the download and all was finished.
Still, I was rather annoyed at what happened. Having spy/malware distributors as advertisers only lowers your reputation, and even I’m surprised a reputable station like Channel 2 would allow that. Ah, well. The problem is solved for now; I’ve blocked both the DriveCleaner and Channel 2 websites on the company proxy server, so hopefully we won’t have to deal with that crap now.
Of course, I’ll have to deal with coworkers asking why it’s blocked now, but I can handle that. :-)
EDIT – 8:35 PM – What the hell? The Houston Chronicle site did it to me too! Damnit, it looks like I’m going to have to write a couple of nasty emails to these sites…