Taboola ($157mm VC funding) partners with malware; Akamai and Amazon complicit

15 points

11 years ago

I'm at my moms house for Mother's Day weekend and cleaned her computer after she told me she was getting a lot of popups. One of the frequent popups was for a site called suchhappy.com which looks like a BuzzFeed/viral content site. You can check out suchhappy.com and see that Taboola partners with them and has big ads showing at the top on the homepage and all over the place when you click into an article.

To see posts about suchhappy.com being malware, look at the below links. After following the instructions I was finally able to get rid of it.

* http://www.fix-exeerror.com/how-do-i-remove-suchhappy-com-step-by-step-removal-guide/

* http://www.malwareremovalvideo.com/fixed-how-can-i-stop-the-suchhappy-com-pop-up-removal-tips/

* http://computervirusremovalfixer.blogspot.com/2015/04/stop-suchhappycom-pop-up-guide-to.html

* http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/574578/suchhappy-redirect-virus-and-getprivate-shopper-7-pro-x64-firefox/

* http://helpremovepopups.com/get-rid-of-suchhappy-com-virus-permanently/

When will VC funded companies stop using malware to grow? How can we, as investors, entrepreneurs, and techies, place pressure on these advertising companies to stop supporting malware? Akamai and Amazon are complicit because they are the CDN on a bunch of the links on the page. Additionally, there are companies called "UDM Serve" and "RevContent" with ads on the page.

What can we do?

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