Did Spotify serve you malware?

Over the past few days, there has been some chatter surrounding Spotify based on a user’s post in the company’s community forum:

There’s something pretty alarming going on right now with Spotify Free. This started several hours ago. If you have Spotify Free open, it will launch — and keep on launching — the default internet browser on the computer to different kinds of malware / virus sites. Some of them do not even require user action to be able to cause harm.

I have 3 different systems (computers) which are all clean and they are all doing this, all via Spotify — I am thinking it’s the Ads in Spotify Free. I hope this has been noticed and Spotify staff are fixing it — fast. But it’s still puzzling something like this can actually happen.

Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident; it appears the free version of Spotify was sending some questionable browser ads. The company noted in response to the user’s post:

We’ve identified an issue where a small number of users were experiencing a problem with questionable website pop-ups in their default browsers as a result of an isolated issue with an ad on our Free tier. We have now identified the source of the problem and have shut it down. We will continue to monitor the situation. If you see this issue again, please let us know the exact date and time in this thread.

The problem seems to have been fixed now. By the way, some time ago a user mentioned to us on Twitter that he was having similar issue with Spotify, also commenting that his Kaspersky product had saved him from the malware.

Dear @Spotify. Thank you for allowing malicious links inside ads. If it weren't for @kaspersky I'd be fucked now. Fix it would ya!!?

— Menno (@MeMenno) September 23, 2016

We’re glad for this user, but we also feel for those who had an unpleasant browsing experience when they were just looking to enjoy some music. This sort of problem is one of many great reasons to have reliable antivirus software. We would recommend looking at Kaspersky Internet Security — the first 30 days are free.