Malicious advertising hits Amazon, YouTube and Yahoo, Cisco says

Malicious advertisements have popped up on websites such as YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo, part of a sophisticated campaign to spread malware, Cisco said Monday.

When encountered, the malicious advertisements cause a person to be redirected to a different website, which triggers a download based on whether the computer is running Windows or Apple’s OS X, wrote Armin Pelkmann, a threat researcher.

The network has been nicknamed “Kyle and Stan” due to those names appearing in subdomains of more than 700 websites the attackers have set up to distribute the malware, Pelkmann wrote. “The large number of domains allows the attackers to use a certain domain just for a very short time, burn it and move on to use another one for future attacks,” he wrote “This helps avoiding reputation and blacklist based security solutions.”