Between December 30, 2013, and January 2, 2014, approximately 2.5 million computers were infected with malicious software as a result of an exploit of Yahoo's advertising platform. According to CNET, "Users who saw pages with the malicious ads were redirected to sites that install intrusive software onto their computers, even if they didn't click on the advertisement."
The response by Yahoo was somewhat baffling. They offered very few details, and they simply stated, "On Friday, January 3 on our European sites, we served some advertisements that did not meet our editorial guidelines, specifically they spread malware. We promptly removed these advertisements." (Isn't it good to know that Yahoo's editorial guidelines do not permit the spreading of malware.)
Although Americans were not affected by this particular issue, it illustrates the many innovative ways in which malware developers are going after our computers. Even when they are not malicious, these advertisements can be annoying, deceptive, and sometimes, downright improper for children and even ourselves.
Fortunately, there is a way to stop them. There are many add-ons available for your browser that will stop malicious advertisements. My personal favorite is Adblock Plus. It does a great job at stopping these ads, and it is available for all major browsers: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Not long after I installed it on my computer, I was looking at one of my websites and could not figure out why my ad would not show up where I wanted it to! However, unless you are developing websites that use advertising, I highly doubt you will miss surfing the web advertisement-free.
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