[Danielle@Sensis]

Hi there – I wanted to provide a quick update on the issue we’ve had with an online advertisement running on our network of sites.

Today we acted swiftly last week to remove a sabotaged banner advertisement that was running on our popular sites such as yellow.com.au, whitepages.com.au, whereis.com, as well as Telstra's BigPond portal.

We were notified on Tuesday morning that a banner advertisement for US travel website skyauction.com, had been sabotaged with malicious code to lure users to download a free malware protection program. Once downloaded, the program then installs spyware on a users PC.

As an immediate step, we removed the advertisement from our MediaSmart ad network and then followed up with further work to ensure the original ad was not accessible anywhere online.

On behalf of Sensis, I’d like to apologise for any inconvenience this caused. As a leading online content and advertising business, we treat online security with the utmost importance and we are absolutely committed to doing all we can to prevent this type of thing occurring again.

For anyone concerned they may have been exposed to any type of malicious code, we suggest running a scan of your computer files using an up-to-date anti-virus program.

And of course the best protection when online is to ensure you are running an up-to-date operating system on your PC, with all the latest upgrades and security patches available from your software provider, as well as running the latest anti-virus and spyware protection programs from reputable providers.

We recommend you also take care when downloading programs to ensure you know exactly what the program and is and who is providing it to you.

One last thing - we’d like to thank Sandi Hardmeier from http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/ for quickly alerting Sensis to this issue.

Regards

Danielle Horan
Sensis