Those seeking their morning fix of conservative punditry at the Daily Caller today were greeted instead with hardcore porn ads, according to Fishbowl DC’s Betsy Rothstein. And as of 11:30 a.m., Google was telling would-be visitors not to call up the site at all. A message in Google search results warned users, “This site may harm your computer,” and clicking through in Chrome or Firefox brought up a warning page like the one shown above.
Via Twitter, the Daily Caller is telling its readers to ignore the warnings and come on in: “.@DailyCaller came under malware attack. We’ve turned back the enemy & reclaimed our land. Site is safe to visit. Thanks 4 your patience.”
Out of reckless curiosity a deep sense of trust of the Daily Caller, I went ahead and clicked through. Sure enough, no porn ads to be seen—just the usual menu of wholesome, family-friendly headlines like “Bloomberg to tots: Suck on this.”
Minutes later, Daily Caller spokeswoman Nicole Roeberg reassured me in an email, “The site IS safe to visit. One of the accounts on our ad server was hacked but the problem has been rectified. No visitors would have gotten malware on our site, the only possibility would be if they had clicked on the ad, but even then I don’t know if anyone would have.”
Assuming she’s right, Google’s warning will remain up only until it re-crawls the site and discovers that it’s now malware-free. On the off chance she’s wrong, apologies in advance for any porn-spam I might soon be sending you.
