Yahoo Ads Serve Up Malware… Yikes!

The potential exists for thousands of users to be infected by malware served up from ads.yahoo.com as I type this. A blog post from a company called Fox IT who specializes in cyber security has all the details. But here’s what you need to know. Simply having the ad being displayed on your screen is enough to redirect users to the malware injection site and have the malware loaded onto your computer leveraging Java to do so.

In response to the breach in security, Yahoo issued the following statement:

“We recently identified an ad designed to spread malware to some of our users,” the company said in a statement to the paper. “We immediately removed it and will continue to monitor and block any ads being used for this activity.”

My thoughts on this? First of all, this is another reason why you should not be running Java. These sorts of attacks are becoming increasingly more common and require no user interaction. That’s scary. As for Yahoo, they need to step up their game when it comes to security. Questions have to be asked about how this happened and what Yahoo will do to keep it from happening again.

 

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