Hackers used the most insulting part of ‪#‎Forbes‬' ‪#‎website‬ to distribute ‪#‎malware‬

Nobody likes an interstitial advertisement. The landing pages and pop-ups that temporarily block our access to whichever link we've clicked on are interruptions at best and counterproductive at worst — there are few better ways to drive visitors away from your site than by asking them to sit through a 20-second entreaty from brands. But while interstitial ads are just about everywhere these days — though not on The Verge! — there's one interstitial ad more offensive than any other. It's on Forbes.com, and it's called the Thought of the Day. And Forbes must be having many thoughts on this day about the Thought of the Day, because it turns out Chinese hackers took over their widget for three days and used it to distribute malware.

Click any link to Forbes and you'll find yourself not where you hoped to arrive but rather on the disingenuously named "welcome screen," sitting at the top of which is the Thought of the Day. It squats in a crudely rendered cartoon speech bubble, indifferently placed toward the top left of your screen, on a backdrop of the bleakest gray. Between the Forbes logo and everything contained in the speech bubble, the Thought is a riot of typefaces; it's as if the designer were being paid by the font. And that's to say nothing of the Thought itself: a platitude so empty of meaning that it barely constitutes a sentence, much less an idea