Minneapolis Star Tribune infecting web readers with a computer virus

File under – more signs newspapers are going out of business

From CityPages – Read the Strib online at your own risk–it is delivering malware to some users.

Reports of the problem surfaced this morning. Here’s one email that was making the rounds among government employees:

We have received a number of tickets this morning reporting a screen that pops up reporting that the PC has a virus and wants the user to purchase software to repair the problem.  The PCs have been infected by malware and the screen is a fake.  Users have reported going to the Star Tribune website and picking it up.  The Star Trib has been working on repairing their site.  We have also had the malware picked up from other media websites – reportedly any owned by Gannet.  Please refrain from visiting these media websites until they have fixed them.

The Star Tribune acknowledged the problem in a note posted on its website at 2:11 p.m.

We received reports over the weekend that a third-party advertising network had been placing a “Malware Ad” onto our site.

A “Malware Ad” is a potentially malicious ad that could contain a virus or attempt to get you to pay for unsolicited services. The ad informs you that your machine has been infected with a virus and that you should click it to run a scan on your machine. We do not approve of this ad and consider it a potential security threat to your computer — although we do not yet know that for certain.

We take this situation very seriously and are responding aggressively to get it resolved. We have removed all ad networks from our site. All advertising networks will be required to perform complete a check of every ad they run, and to verify that they are not running this ad, before we allow them to run on our site.

If you have seen an ad matching this description after 1 p.m. today (Monday), please let us know about it by emailing jason.erdahl@startribune.com.