Malware delivered by Yahoo, Fox, Google ads

[Night Hawk]

March 22, 2010 12:57 PM PDT

Malware delivered by Yahoo, Fox, Google ads

by Elinor Mills

These charts show incidences of malware distributed by a number of ad delivery platforms over a six-day period last month that were detected by Avast. Yahoo and Fox have the highest counts.
(Credit: Avast)

Malware that exploits holes in popular applications is being delivered by big ad delivery platforms including those run by Yahoo, Fox, and Google, according to Prague-based antivirus firm Avast.

Viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on high-profile sites like The New York Times and conservative news aggregator Drudge Report.com, and this year on Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed "malvertising."

Now, researchers at Avast are pointing fingers at some large ad delivery platforms including Yahoo's Yield Manager and Fox Audience Network's Fimserve.com, which together cover more than 50 percent of online ads, and to a much smaller degree Google's DoubleClick. In addition, some of the malicious ads ended up on Yahoo and Google sites, Avast claims.

More at: Malware delivered by Yahoo, Fox, Google ads | InSecurity Complex - CNET News

 

[pparks1]

Part of the reason that i maintain that you cannot simply rely on "common sense" to protect you these days.

 

[Night Hawk]

Even when running a quick search with the Bing search box on IE 8 without the IE security bar enabled the first link in the results placed a trojan on the system here! That was big letdown for the new MS search engine as well as showing how nothing is ever 100% fool proof!

 

[smsff7]

wow and site owners complain when users use add blockers...Makes me want to install and run a add blocker ASAP

 

[Night Hawk]

You'll find now that many sites will have ads scripted right into the web pages themselves where simply not allowing unwanted popups options in browsers is the only thing you can do. 3rd party addon blockers simply become a waste of time and prove ineffective even with some separate popups depending on how those are written.

Popups and scripted ads are still only part of the problem. Improved filtering in browsers to start with as well as cooperation from sites like Google, Yahoo, and others would be the largest help there. It's just like seeing spam mail come into a brand new unused email account courtesy of your own ISP even when the address was never given out you know someone had to pass along some info to advertisers!