Malicious Ads have troubled the online advertising industry in the past, and continue to trouble again. Yes, this time it’s Microsoft.

Microsoft Corp. has filed five lawsuits against five unknown individuals under the business names Soft Solutions, DirectAd, qiweroqw.com, ITmeter INC. and ote2008.info in Washington state court this Thursday. Microsoft is asking a court for damages and a court order to stop these advertisers from operating normally.

What are Malicious Ads?

The term “malware,” derived from “malicious software,” refers to any software specifically designed to harm a computer or the software it’s running.Malware can be installed on a computer, with or without your knowledge, in a number of ways—usually when you visit a contaminated website or download seemingly innocent software. Malware ads are an attempt to use advertising to distribute malware by including malicious code inside the ad creative.

How does Malicious Ads behave?

Its very hard to predict the bahaviour of the malicious ad. The look and feel of the ad would be normal most of the times, but sometimes it would act funny by showing blank ads or inappropriate ad, making it easy to identify. Some known behaviours are as follows:

1. The malicious ads on a website would not load or if loaded,would disorient the layout of the website.
2. As soon as the malicious ad load, for instance an SWF/flash based ad creative, they would crash the browser.
3. The malicious ads would load an unapproved or unauthorized ads. Hard for the user to recognize until clicked to redirect to a wrong website.
4. The malicious ads if clicked, would lead to download spyware  or would lead to much more privacy damaging issues.

What harm can it do?

Just like any other malware, malicious ads, if allowed, would harm the computer, this could just be the user experience or harming the whole software system.

General Tips

• Be careful of what you download
• Keep your system, browser, anti-virus and spyware prevention software updated regularly.
• Keep up with the internet subscribe to news groups or newsletters related to internet security

What to do if you suspect Malware in your system?

• Stop all activity connected with online financial activity, passwords and other sensitive information.
• Run a software virus and spyware update to have the latest definitions avaialable and installed.
• Once you confirm that your security software is up-to-date, run it to scan your computer for viruses and spyware.
• If the problem persists after you diagnose and treat it locally, consult an expert.
• Once your computer is back up and running normally, think about how malware could have been downloaded to your machine, and what you could do to avoid it in the future.
• Finally, always monitor your computer for unusual behavior.

What to do if you suspect a certain website is displaying malware ads?

• If you suspect the website to display a malware ad. Do report it to the website contact or raise an alarm in the website forum or blog comments, for further investigation by the website team/webmaster.
• Block the website from being accessed on your computer by adding it to the unsafe list till the threat is cleared.
• Run antivirus and spyware checks and check for unusual changes.

More on this:

Recently a top Google executive, Eric Davis, the head of anti-malvertising at Google, speaking  at the Virus Bulletin 09 conference  said that “the company can’t do it alone  to prevent malicious ads from finding their way onto search result pages and other Web sites. Instead, he suggested that an industry-wide coalition comprising ISPs and other concerned parties would ring in a major effect on the epidemic of malicious ads.”

Malicious ads turns out to be an industry problem as a whole, Is there a permanent solution to this problem? We should wait and watch. In the mean time take a look at the Google’s anti-malvertising.com website, which seems to be the first step against this epidemic.

Read more at MSNBC.