Fergie's Tech Blog

Yahoo! Feeds Trojan-Laden Ads to MySpace and PhotoBucket Users

Dan Goodin writes on The Register:

A Yahoo-owned advertising network became the unwitting ally of cyber crooks after it spewed millions of Trojan-laced banner ads on MySpace, PhotoBucket and other websites.

The banner ads, which were brokered by Right Media, were served an estimated 12 million times over a three-week period starting in early August, according to ScanSafe, a managed security provider. Earlier this year, Yahoo paid $650m to acquire the 80 percent of the company it didn't already own.

The banners contained a Flash file that silently installed a Trojan back door on unpatched Windows machines that visited the popular web destinations. Using an unpatched version of Internet Explorer while visiting MySpace or PhotoBucket was all that was necessary to become infected. The ads also ran on TheSun.co.uk, Bebo.com and UltimateGuitar.com.

Security Fix reported the story earlier.

posted by Fergie @ 9/10/2007 05:55:00 PM