Playlist.com advertisers will try to give you malware

Sometimes, when I want to play a song immediately, I cruise over to www.playlist.com and do a quick search.  They have a HUGE database of links to songs that can be streamed over the internet for free and even offer the capability to create a player/playlist that can be embedded in your MySpace or personal website.  Users of Playlist.com can create playlists which are accessible to the internet via the website search engine, a feature I like alot because I can discover new songs by artists similar to the one I was looking up.

While I really like their site, their advertising leaves something to be desired. 

1. They use advertising banners on their site (nothing wrong with that), but when you’re playing someone’s playlist over the web, their ad serving system will keep browsing page by page to present new advertising messages.   The most annoying thing about this way of serving ads is I can’t just click BACK to return to the list of playlists when I wish to return.  I have to click BACK as many times as there were ads served.  If I leave the playlist open overnight then I don’t even bother and just open a new window for playlist.com.  I really hope that their advertisers don’t pay by the impression…haha.
2. The other thing that I noticed with their ads is they contain alot of unsafe content.  I have Trend Micro AV and it has warned me many times about unsafe content coming from the playlist ads.  But it gets worse:

The newest threat which I encountered today comes in the form of a familiar link on my screen:

Click on the picture for a partial screenshot.

The IP address this malware is coming from is: 85.12.44.155  which maps to the Netherlands.

I’m going to assume that Playlist doesn’t know this is going on and write them a short note.  I’ll post back here if they respond.

Update 4/5/2010

Playlist Customer Service was quick to respond and ask for a URL and screenshot to the offending domain, so I directed them to my blog (free hits? haha) and I also did some more digging on my own after hours at work.  It turns out the above IP is not the primary offender. 

I tried out some links in my cache and found this link which forwards to the other bad IP:  http://64.27.21.23/73484839/ (this is probably the link saved in their ad system)

Do Not click on this link, just trust me.  That IP is an unassigned IP registered to www.calpop.com Inc.

I recommended contacting them to let them know they have someone forwarding an IP of theirs to a malware site.  If playlist doesn’t contact them then I might.

Here is that screenshot of my cache I promised support:

Update 4/6/2010

Support emailed me this afternoon and told me it is fixed.  Where do I send my bill?  🙂

Update 4/14/2010

Another email from Support.  I gotta hand it to them, they are really responsive to my concerns.  I was told that the malware issue was dealt with, and it appears that it was.
On another note, they indicated that the ad refresh issue shouldn’t be happening at all.  I tried it again and unfortunately the ads still show up in Internet Explorer 8 as a new page:

FYI Playlist…the issue doesn’t occur with Safari 4.0.5, but it does occur with Firefox 3.6.3

It appears that this issue is rather common side effect of using FRAMES.  This website has more info on designing with Frames and working with its idiosyncrasies.

Today another advertiser tried a redirect from the Playlist page I was on.  This time it redirected to: http://212.95.37.248/92002233/ which goes to another page that was blocked by Trend.  Here’s a screenshot of the warning my Trend Micro threw up.