The year started with not-so-pleasant omens for Yahoo, since, as the company admitted, from December 31 to January 3, ads containing malware were detected on the European page, affecting more than 2 million users.
According to techgear, the malware in question contained the Zeus Trojan designed to infect a computer and use it to "fish" for bitcoins.
Apart from a slight drop in its operating speed, the latter showed no other symptoms indicating that it had been infected with a virus. Users who clicked on the “infected” ads were redirected to a wide range of domains, all of which were linked to a Dutch IP address.
According to Dutch security firm Fox IT, which discovered the malware, 27,000 users were being targeted by the infected ads every hour, while the attackers were earning around $100,000 per day.
However, mobile device users, Mac users, and those with the latest versions of Java on their computers remained unaffected.
