The Economist urges readers to check it they were saddled with malware

Popular UK-based news outfit The Economist – or rather, some of its online readers – have become the latest confirmed victims of an attack executed by hacking anti-adblocking service PageFair.

“If you visited economist.com at any time between Oct. 31, 23:52 GMT and Nov. 1, 01:15 GMT, using Windows OS and you do not have trusted anti-virus software installed, it is possible that malware, disguised as an Adobe update, was downloaded onto your PC,” The Economist warned.

They advised victims to change their passwords on all systems, contact their financial providers and check bank and credit card statements for unusual activity, download, install and run AV software and run a scan.

According to PageFair, over 90% of antivirus tools now detect and can remove the malware (Nanocore Trojan).

“The malware only succeeded in downloading onto a fraction of computers, could only affect Windows, required the user to run it despite warnings, and could be detected by various antiviruses. As a result, our current estimate is than less than 2% of visitors to the 501 publishers affected during the attack were at risk, and that a much smaller percentage are likely to have had the malware installed by running it,” PageFair estimated.

The company provided instructions on how users can check if they were victimized in this attack, and has been pretty open about the whole thing (it all started with phishing emails).