Yahoo Ads used to deliver Flash malware


Dino Grandoni for NTY:

The scheme, which Yahoo shut down on Monday, worked like this: A group of hackers bought ads across the Internet giant's sports, news and finance sites. When a computer -- in this case, one running Windows -- visited a Yahoo site, it downloaded malware code.

From there, the malware hunted for an out-of-date version of Adobe Flash, which it could use to commandeer the computer -- either holding it for ransom until the hackers were paid off or discreetly directing its browser to websites that paid the hackers for traffic.

Wonderful. If you can't bring yourself to uninstalling Flash, you probably should consider a Flash blocking plugin for your browser. That way at least you can control which Flash elements run on your computer.