Why you saw malware warnings around the web today

Users of the Chrome web browser, and that's more of the web all the time, were met by a big scary malware warning today at popular news sites. We've seen the warning interrupt the New York Times, the LA Daily News and other sites today. Others known to be affected include The Hollywood Reporter, the Guardian, IMDb and more. The common link is that they all run ads served by the servers at NetSeer.com. There is no actual risk. Atlantic Wire explains:

NetSeer.com, which describes itself as a "concept-based contextual advertising" outfit, was hacked Monday morning, according to ZDNet's Zack Whittacker. The breach got into NetSeer's corporate website, not its ad network, but both use the same domain name — NetSeer.com — which led Google to put that address on its warning list for all Chrome users....

Unlike NetSeer, those that carry the temporary Google warning have no harmful content on them — and users who see the warning pages shouldn't worry about malware infections, according to NetSeer and The Guardian, one of the dozens of affected sites. It's unclear if Google meant to block both the domain that serves the ads, as well as the NetSeer company website.

Meanwhile, NetSeer claims it has removed all the malware from its own website and is working with Google throughout the day to take its domain off the Chrome blacklist...