The Security Mentor

Anti-virus firm Trend Micro describes malicious software on Italian web sites. They have more technical detail than you want, but the important point is that the bad guys are taking over legitimate web sites and using them to take over visitors's machines.

This is scary because you can't protect yourself by staying out of the "bad neighborhoods" of the web. They took over a bunch of perfectly normal web pages.

The attack was sophisticated. The malicious software checked what kind of web browser was connecting to it and looked up security holes to use against it based on what version it was.

You can defend yourself by

• Staying up to date on security patches for your web browser, so it's less likely that a nasty web page can take it over
• Running antivirus software. It may help.
• Not allowing Javascript to run, as I've discussed many times.