One of the web's most popular email providers has been exploited as a result of one of the web's most insecure applications, Adobe Flash. Mozilla has recently disabled flash by default in its Firefox browser. YouTube has been gradually moving away from Adobe's creation and portable Apple devices as well as Blackberry products do not play nicely with Flash, at all. These are all examples of the growing acceptance that Flash has outlived its need, a realization that HTLM5 renders Flash unnecessary.
Flash has long been seen as resource hungry and unstable, the word insecure initially penciled in should by now be added to the narrative in red ink. Ever since Steve Job's 2009 letter discrediting Adobe's Flash, the 'middleware' has been on a slow downward spiral. From being the preferred means of sharing media on websites in 2009 to its current rate of occurrence of 10.4% in 2015 (courtesy of W3Techs).
YAHOO is one of the most popular search engines and email service providers. Their popularity could be taken as a sign that they are one of the most trusted internet outfits in operation. The company, headquartered in California, possesses the fourth most visited website globally, as per SimilarWeb stats. The Seven billion visitors per month make YAHOO an attractive prospect for advertisers and hackers alike.
With those numbers in mind it should not surprise anyone to hear that hackers have invested in advertising across YAHOO's many subcategories, including the popular sports, news and finance sections. Here, they are alleged to have set up advertising campaigns that inadvertently installed malware code onto Windows machines with old versions of Adobe Flash. The hackers took advantage of their ability to remotely control hardware by requesting ransom payments from compromised users. In other cases hackers added the compromised hardware to their botnets in order to rack up fraudulent traffic and thus financially benefit from their advertising campaigns.
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