Yahoo buys company that prevents malware from spreading through advertisements

Yahoo has bought ClarityRay. The Israeli company made the announcement on its site, but did not disclose any terms of the deal. ClarityRay provides technology to prevent the spread of malware through advertisements.

ClarityRay started out as a company that helped publishers with services to fight ad blockers. The company believed that ad blockers can cost them a lot of money because publishers can’t show ads to a portion of their visitors.

Since then, ClarityRay’s vision has changed and it is mainly concerned with fraud detection in advertisements and securing it. The latter, in particular, has become a major problem lately, as malware authors use advertisements to distribute rogue software through major sites. Note that Yahoo distributed malware in Europe in this way at the beginning of this year, presumably for bitcoin mining.

A Yahoo spokesperson told TechCrunch that ClarityRay’s technology will be used to protect advertisements to help prevent infections like earlier this year. “Providing advertising is an essential part of our core business and we are committed to doing it the right way.”

Yahoo has been on a takeover path for quite some time now. It recently bought advertising company Flurry and a tool for graphically displaying data from social media. ClarityRay says it wants to further expand its technology with the acquisition by Yahoo.