It has been years since Yahoo became a piece of cybercriminals’ traffic monetization puzzle, but this is still a scheme whose gist seems murky.
Mixing malware campaigns with reputable services is the norm in today’s computer threat landscape. Not only is this tactic a way to make an attack look quasi-legitimate, but it may also be interpreted as collusion all the involved parties benefit from. At this point, it isn’t entirely clear which motivation is behind the spread of the Yahoo Search redirect virus in the macOS environment. The only sure-shot takeaway from its shenanigans is that its operators’ appetite comes with eating, as the traffic-hijacking wave has grown into a serious issue.
The threat manifests itself as follows: after installing a malware-laden application, a Mac user keeps going to search.yahoo.com whenever they enter search requests in the URL area of Safari, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox. On a side note, the baddie supports all these browsers to the same extent, with some infection reports relating to Opera as well. (more…)
