Find Your Be Aware of Malware
‘Malware’ is a term used to refer to a variety of forms of intrusive software and other malicious programs. Malware is often disguised as, or embedded in, non-malicious files, such as photos, apps and video.
How Does Malware Happen?
Once infected, your computer could try to ‘trick’ you by placing ads, popups and more on top of websites — even yours — that look like they are part of the website.
As you can see by the screenshot above, this malware-infected computer sees a grey ‘Special Offers’ bar at the bottom of the Better Homes and Gardens site that points off-site to order gatherers’ products.
It is designed to look like part of the website and deceive visitors into clicking on these ‘Special Offers’. Even major websites cannot combat malware when visited by an infected computer.
What Does Malware Mean For Florists?
There are many order gatherers and wire serves who use this type of deceptive, malware advertising. This means that when an infected computer visits your site and sees words like ‘flowers’ it will automatically display ads on the page.
Malware can appear on any website that triggers its keywords. In the above examples, it is mostlikely hitting keywords like ‘florist’ and ‘flowers’.
When Does This Happen?
Even major wire services cannot resist the temptation to use this malicious advertising style during major flower holidays (Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, for example) when they think florists won’t be paying attention. While malware happens all the time, we see a huge increase in reports of these targeted ads during floral holidays.
What Can You Do About It?
While you can keep your own computer clear of malware, there is really nothing you can do to keep this from happening on your website visitor’s computers.
However, one way to combat this is to not deal with these order gatherers and wire services who pay to partner with these malicious ads that prey on local florists.
