Evil Ads on Bravenet

Bravenet's free photo albums contain ads, and at least one of them will try to install something, most likely adware, onto an unprotected Windows computer. The day before yesterday, I clicked on a regular, non-spammer person's Bravenet photo album page and I got 25 download notification windows for installer.exe files from http://ax.web-nexus.net.

From what I was able to determine from snooping around on the internet and reading the web-nexus.net description in Google, the executables were most likely adware.

I was using Firefox on a Macintosh, so these executables didn't download and infest my computer. I don't know the exact evil ad that somehow spawned them, but I did see this message in my browser status bar:

Transferring data from adserv.valuead.com…

Bravenet has a rotating stable of ads so not every free photo album visit will result in an adware assault. Just out of curiosity I hit reload over a dozen or so times before I finally got another slew of installer.exe download notification windows.

If you are a Windows user and visit Bravenet free photo albums, I would highly recommend using Firefox or setting Internet Explorer's security zone to the highest level.