The cybercriminals who infected the computers of European Yahoo users apparently wanted to create a huge Bitcoin network.
Researchers at security firm Light Cyber revealed this week that one of the malware programs aimed to use the resources of infected PCs to perform the calculations necessary to run a Bitcoin network. Reported earlier this month by fellow security firm Fox IT, the campaign spread its package by using Yahoo's ad server to deploy malicious ads. The malware took advantage of vulnerabilities in Java to install itself on computers that visited the ads.yahoo.com site.