An article posted at TechSport.com alleges that a Yahoo! company, Right Media, accidentally served ads that contained trojan viruses on MySpace and PhotoBucket, among other Web sites.

The banner ads, which were brokered by Right Media, were served an estimated 12 million times over a three-week period starting in early August, according to ScanSafe, a managed security provider. Earlier this year, Yahoo paid $650m to acquire the 80 percent of the company it didn’t already own.

How exactly did this happen? Obviously, Right Media doesn’t generate all the ads they send out – other companies make them, and advertise through them. It’s up to Right Media, however, to sort through those ads and make sure they are clean. Apparently someone dropped the ball on that, with unscrupulous folks being able to turn their own check system against them:

”… hackers were able to circumvent these checks by programming the flash file not to attack machines associated with Right Media’s Internet domain. “

This shows the importance of having an updated anti-virus, an enabled firewall, and router so that you’re protected against most attack types including exploited Web pages.

[Yahoo! accidentally dishes out trojans via banner ads]

[tags]antivirus, antivirus software, anti virus, anti virus software[/tags]