Malware delivered by Yahoo, Fox, Drudge, Google ads

By GottaLaff

(click on image to enlarge)

These charts show incidences of malware distributed by a number of ad delivery platforms over a six-day period last month that were detected by Avast. Yahoo and Fox have the highest counts. (Credit: Avast)

Drudge and ClusterFox make us sick enough already. Now we have their computer viruses to contend with:

Malware that exploits holes in popular applications is being delivered by big ad delivery platforms including those run by Yahoo, Fox, and Google, according to Prague-based antivirus firm Avast.

Viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on high-profile sites like The New York Times and conservative news aggregator Drudge Report.com, and this year on Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed "malvertising." [...]

Users don't need to click on anything to get infected; a computer becomes infected after the ad is loaded by the browser, Avast said.

More here.

Britney more popular than Obama

Finally, the natural order of the intertubes has been restored. Adolescent boys missed you Brit!!

Barack Obama will make history by becoming the first black US president, but in the world of internet search he trails the singer, Britney Spears.

Of the billions of searches carried out on the portal, Yahoo.com, over the last year, Mr Obama was third behind Spears and World Wrestling Entertainment.

Mr Obama was, however, the most searched-for politician during 2008.

The subjects of the most sought-after news stories were hurricanes, Caylee and Casey Anthony, and election 2008.

O'Reilly Blasts Hackers, Hackers Hack Him Back

Worth it for the headline alone. Yum, tasty schadenfreude.

Wired is reporting FNC anchor Bill O'Reilly's personal Web site, BillOReilly.com, has been hacked in a response to his attacks on hackers and Gawker.com this week.

"The attack was retaliation for comments that O'Reilly made on the air this week about web sites that published e-mails obtained from the Yahoo account of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, according to a press release distributed by WikiLeaks late Friday," writes Kim Zetter. The hacked material includes "names, e-mail addresses, city and state, and the password," subscribers use on his site.

Republicans collect money via Yahoo toolbar clicks

By GottaLaff

The RNC is collecting as you click:

The presidential candidates have tried all manner of ways to pry money out of donors this year through the Internet. Now, the Republican National Committee has come up with a technique that can generate cash for the party when a supporter searches the Web for, say, “Barack Obama.”

Viewed as a win-win for both the committee and e-commerce sites, a new browser toolbar allows users to send two or three cents each time they conduct a Yahoo-based Web search through the toolbar. The service also lets the R.N.C. take a percentage of sales when toolbar users make purchases from about 300 vendors around the Web. [...]

The microdonations to the committee are technically payments from the advertisers to users for conducting the search, which users agree to send directly to the party through a licensing agreement upon installation. That way, the party can track how much each donor is generating to make sure the amount does not surpass the Federal Election Commission’s limit of $28,500 — or about 1.4 million searches.

We've called them "tools", but now we'll have to start calling them "toolbars", too.