Unanswered Questions About Malware Attack On Yahoo

After Saturday’s discovery of Malware infecting visitors to Yahoo.com by security firm Fox IT, we still have some questions that need to be answered. Users who have used Yahoo in the last couple of days and have gone to malicious sites have been redirected to sites that have been armed with a code that exploits vulnerabilities in Java and installs a variety of different Malware on the user’s computer.

After the discovery Yahoo released two statements, One on Saturday which read;

“At Yahoo, we take the safety and privacy of our users seriously. We recently identified an ad designed to spread malware to some of our users. We immediately removed it and will continue to monitor and block any ads being used for this activity.”

Following the release of this statement on Sunday Yahoo released this second statement;

“At Yahoo, we take the safety and privacy of our users seriously. On Friday, January 3 on our European sites, we served some advertisements that did not meet our editorial guidelines, specifically they spread malware. We promptly removed these advertisements. Users in North America, Asia-Pacific and Latin America were not served these advertisements and were not affected. Additionally, users using Macs and mobile devices were not affected.”

While Mac users and mobile users are safe, questions still need to be answered for those PC users out there that may have had Malware installed on their PC’s. Since Yahoo has released no information regarding how the malware got on their website, how many users are affected  and what affected users should do, another security firm called surfright has offered their take on the Yahoo.com malware attack. In a statement released by surfright researchers, they wrote;

“We estimate that up to 2 millions computers could be infected. However not every ad on the Yahoo advertisement network contained the malicious iframe, but if you have an outdated version of Java Runtime (you can check here) and you used Yahoo Mail the last 6 days, your computer is likely infected. In addition, we also received reports that the malware was spreading through ads in Yahoo Messenger as well. So if you used Yahoo’s services lately, it’s a good idea to scan your computer for malware.”

The malware that could be affecting your computer could be anything from disabling antivirus software, click fraud, user name and password theft and remote control of a computer. For those who are worried we suggest doing a malware scan straight away. A good program to use to scan for Malware is Malwarebytes.

Thank you CNET for the information provided

Image courtesy of Guardian Liberty Voice