ExtraTorrent | Yahoo Planted Malware into European PCs

[Atreides]

About 2 million Yahoo users in Europe may have recently received malware from virus-laden adverts served by its homepage within a 4-day period. The malware could turn computers into Bitcoin miners (a huge drain on its computing resources) without users’ knowledge. The company has been criticized for declining to say how many people could be affected by the malware or do anything to help their users. According to security experts, flaws in Java modules on systems were attacked.
 

Yahoo has officially admitted that in the beginning of January it had served some ads on its European sites that didn’t meet the editorial guidelines – specifically, they spread malware. Only European users were affected, and not the ones who used Apple Macs or mobile devices.

Yahoo promised to continue monitoring and blocking any adverts being used for this activity and to provide more data for the users soon. Security experts pointed out that one of the malware programs delivered in the attack turned a machine into a Bitcoin miner: it was set to work performing the calculations required to make the Bitcoin network run, through all rewards for doing so went to the hackers.

The company was criticized for failing to do more to help affected users – for instance, Yahoo didn’t address any of the details, like how the malware exploit got into its web pages, who exactly was impacted, and what victims should do. The suggestion is that Yahoo may still be collecting data.

According to estimations of security experts, around 27,000 users were infected every hour the malware was on the website. You can count that if the malware was being served consistently for at least 3 days, almost 2 million computers may have been infected.