Thursday, December 17, 2015
Tech note on 'Exploit SWF_C'
Last night I started getting this warning from AVG antivirus. AVG was catching several types of Trojans, mainly from Googleapis. All of them reduce to Exploit SWF_C, according to AVG's info. Seems to be a common problem, reported by lots of people in lots of forums yesterday and today.
AVG gives reports like this:
"Trojan horse Exploit.SWF_c.APS, imasdk.googleapis.com/flash/core/3.220.0/adsapi.swf";"Secured";"12/17/2015, 4:31:13 AM";"URL"
After searching a bit more, I could see that this stuff is part of AdBlock Plus. Removed AdBlock Plus from Firefox, and now I'm not getting the virus warnings.
Correlation isn't causation, but it's working so far. I hope the AdBlock people get it fixed soon. I'm willing to turn off AdBlock selectively for websites that have 'polite' ads, but a few websites (eg ZeroHedge) are totally unusable without AdBlock.
Few hours later: Nope, spoke too soon. Still getting the imasdk shit from UK Telegraph.
24 hours later: All of the shit is gone. Turned AdBlock on again, tried all the sites that had been throwing trojans before. Nothing now. Points to a single source that fixed the problem. Was it in Googleapis itself? We'll never know.
¶ 5:26 AM 
