Walrath was the SVP of advertising strategy when he decided to quit. Walrath said that it was time to move on with his career and he was looking forward to taking time off and working with smaller and innovative companies. Bill Wise, another Right Media executive will be filling in for Walrath.

Wise said that Yahoo! is currently trying to rebrand Right Media to focus on higher quality display advertisers. “We always thought there would be a maturation phase where Right Media would move more up market and Carol (Bartz) has come in and accelerated the road map,” stated Wise.

“The banners contained a Flash file that silently installed a Trojan back door on unpatched Windows machines that visited the popular web destinations,” wrote Dan Goodin, an author for The Register.  “Using an unpatched version of Internet Explorer while visiting MySpace or PhotoBucket was all that was necessary to become infected. The ads also ran on TheSun.co.uk, Bebo.com and UltimateGuitar.com.”

Right Media tends to download advertisements and test them for viruses, but the hackers in this case made the virus avoid harming computers at Right Media’s offices and Internet domains.

“The ad has been identified as a high risk creative and banned from the exchange. However, we cannot control what happens elsewhere on the Net. We continue to enhance our protective tools and are committed to finding ways of keeping this type of activity away from consumers and publishers,” stated a Yahoo spokeswoman.

The Trojan virus is called Trojan Downloader.VBS.Agent.n and did three checks before determining whether to download itself onto a victim’s computer.  The three checks include whether the victim is using IE, 2.) if the victim did not install Microsoft Data Access Components patches, and 3.) if the computer was not connected to a Right Media domain.

Google announced on April 13, 2007 that the company would be acquiring DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion. This announcement rippled concerns amongst various other media companies, Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo! Inc. regarding monopolistic practices. Yahoo! counter-acted this concern by fully acquiring Right Media for $680 million on top of its previous $45 million investment.

“By now you’ve heard that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire Right Media (read Terry Semel’s post here). This is fantastic news for both companies, Exchange members and the industry in general,” stated Michael Walrath, CEO of Right Media [Source: Right Media blog]. “There’s still a lot of friction in this industry that prevents buyers and sellers from working together to everyone’s mutual benefit. I believe that the Right Media Exchange has done a lot to eliminate that friction, and this deal is a great catalyst to an even more efficient interactive ad market.”

“The acquisition, to us, is a key step toward executing our long-term vision to build the leading advertising and publisher ecosystem both on and off the Yahoo network,” stated CEO of Yahoo! Inc., Terry Semel in an interview [Source: NYTimes].

The deal will be closing within 3 months and will be paid for in cash and stock. This should alleviate concerns about the CEO of Yahoo! not making the right moves in competing with Google. Google turned down a $3 billion offer and social network, Facebook.com turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo!