Unknowingly to blog owners, hackers use their blogs to infect computers with spy ware. This is a security flaw in many self-blogs that affects millions of people who use the web.

Security experts said malicious programmers can use JavaScript and ActiveX to automatically deliver spy ware from a blog to people who visit the site with a vulnerable web browser.

If you own a small business blog that publishes articles you could unwittingly be using an infected tool as a delivery platform for spy ware.

Richard Stiennon, chief of technology at Webroot Software, a maker of anti-spyware technology, said: "It is one more link in the commerce chain of illicit adware."

Users of Internet Explorer are very vulnerable. In fact security experts say the problem only affects web surfers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer who fail to choose the highest IE browser security settings.

If you use Google's Blogger as your small business blog you are vulnerable as the problem has cropped up most visibly in this most widely blog publishing tool.

Another popular blog, Blogspot.com has been exposed to infection and visitors have complained that they were exposed to infected sites when they used the "Next Blog" link. The feature was designed to help people discover new journals and takes web surfers to a random Blogspot site.

Ben Edelman, a Harvard University researcher who has documented the vulnerability on his site, referring to Blogger, said: "They left the back door wide open."

Edelman said that one major culprit of malicious code was a service called iWebtunes.com, which lets people add music to the web sites in the form of a couple lines of JavaScript code. Bloggers using Blogspot might embed the iWebtunes code into their template and then pass on the spyware unwittingly to visitors to their site.

Faced with increasing cyber crime and cyber ware, small businesses that publish articles and news via small business marketing blog should take all the precaution they can to avoid being victims the this increasing menace.

That includes taking the advice of Webroot's Stiennon who advises people to switch to the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox web browser for reading blogs. Either do that, or change IE security settings to deactivate ActiveX or JavaScript in the web browser, he said.

Based on article published by www.silicon.com