Quote:Ars Technica was recently used to serve second-stage malware in a campaign that used a never-before-seen attack chain to cleverly cover its tracks, researchers from security firm Mandiant reported Tuesday.

A benign image of a pizza was uploaded to a third-party website and was then linked with a URL pasted into the “about” page of a registered Ars user. Buried in that URL was a string of characters that appeared to be random—but were actually a payload. The campaign also targeted the video-sharing site Vimeo, where a benign video was uploaded and a malicious string was included in the video description.