Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! Settle Gambling-Ad Charges
Companies’ combined payment totals $31.5 million.
Posted: 12:19 PM PST Dec 27, 2007
ST. LOUIS - Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! will pay a total of $31.5 million to settle the Department of Justice’s claims that they promoted illegal gambling with online ads from 1997 to 2007.
The settlements call for payments of $21 million from Microsoft, $7.5 million from Yahoo! and $3 million from Google.
“These sums add to the over $40 million in forfeitures and back taxes this office has already recovered in recent years from operators of these remote-control illegal gambling enterprises,” said U.S. Attorney Catherine L. Hanaway. “Honest taxpayers and gambling-industry personnel who do follow the law suffer from those who promote illegal online behavior.”
The settlements also order Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide free online advertising for public-service campaigns designed to inform young people that online gambling is illegal in the United States.
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Operations: What you Need to Know
This Week’s Top 10 Spyware Threats
At the top of the charts is a real nasty called Trojan.FakeAlert. It consists of files that cause false warnings of spyware on the computer. Usually the alerts are displayed in a balloon type pop-up from an icon in the system tray. Trojan.FakeAlert displays these false warnings when rogue security software is installed, usually by exploits, and is used to frighten the user into buying the rogue software. It goes by a number of aliases including DesktopScam, Trojan.Win32.StartPage.amn, Adware.WorldSearch, Adware.FindSpyware, Trojan-Fakealert.FB, Virus.Win32.Nsag.b, W32/Nsag.B, Virus.Win32.Nsag.a, Trojan.Downloader.Slvr, Trojan.TopAntispyware, Adware.Topantispyware, Trojan.Win32.TopAntiSpyware.
Needless to say you want to remove this bugger if you spot it.
Trojan.FakeAlert: Trojan
Trojan-Downloader.Zlob.Media-Codec: Trojan Downloader
Virtumonde: Adware (General)
ClickSpring.PuritySCAN: Adware (General)
Hotbar: Toolbar
WhenU.Save: Adware (General)
Rootkit.Win32.Agent.eq: Rootkit
Trojan.NewMediaCodec: Trojan Downloader
Trojan.Unclassified.gen: Trojan
MyGeek/CPVFeed: Browser Plug-in
Stay on top of all the real-time threats:
http://www.counterspynews.com/071217-Research-Center
Michael Caruso
CEO ClickFacts
Press: Silicon Valley Bank Entrepreneur Showcase-winner, New York Post, AP Press, Barrons, Bloomberg, CNET, and Media Post: http://www.clickfacts.com
Recent Malware Activity
Warning to Social Network Users: Beware of Flirting Bots
Government Technology - Folsom,CA,USA
“CyberLover has been designed as a bot that lures victims automatically, without human intervention. If it’s spawned in multiple instances on multiple…”
See all stories on this topic…
Top 10 countries for cybercrime:
Recent Malware activity:
DoubleClick Spyware + Video of it in action:
Visit Source for More…
The malware-spiked ads have been spotted on various legitimate websites, ranging from the British magazine The Economist to baseball’s MLB.com to the Canada.com news portal. Hackers are using deceptive practices and tricky Flash programming to get their ads onto legitimate sites by way of DoubleClick’s DART program. Web publishers use the DoubleClick-hosted platform to manage advertising inventory.
DoubleClick acknowledges the malware is out there, and says it has implemented a new security-monitoring system that has thus far captured and disabled a hundred ads.
Flash Exploiting Malware
A big batch of malware-infected ads are circulating on a slew of popular sites including MLB.com, NHL.com and the Australian site, www.whitepages.com.au. The ads were apparently bought and paid for by rogue antivirus software sellers, who posed as legitimate advertisers.
The malware is being disguised as a Flash file that has a redirect function encrypted in the file, so that when publishers upload the ad file the malware is not detectable. Once deployed on a site, the Flash file launches the malicious redirects, perhaps triggered at certain times or in certain locations.
You can see this malware exploit in action in a YouTube video
Original Source: http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/rogue-ads-on-ad-networks.html
