A close shave with cunning malware

Our advertising team - fine men and women all, and I'm not just saying that because of their role in my drinks bill - forwarded me a fascinating note.

It seems that a bad person had faked himself a convincing identity as a media buyer in Denmark. For those of you lucky enough not to know, media buyers are strange intermediary lifeforms who cut deals with media outlets for advertisers. They can be... challenging to deal with.

This one, however, had a straightforward proposition. He wanted to book adverts for Gillette, which has a big campaign for Fusion/Venus razors going on now. He seemed to check out - his email and ad server domains were very well faked, looking just like those of a genuine agency, and you don't need much persuasion to get ad sales to sell ad space.

Indeed, his adverts were perfectly normal - at first. But his plan was to switch these to spyware/malware bearing versions after a short delay, thus neatly embedding nastiness in perfectly proper publications.

The good news is that his foul scheme has been thwarted, with the community of ad sales bods now thoroughly alerted and all the offending fake campaigns removed. The better news is that you really, really don't want to get on the wrong side of ad sales, who take this all very personally - so anyone else trying it on will find the market a lot harder to fool. Personally, I wouldn't recommend the experiment. These people are best kept sweet...