Last year over 10 billion online ad impressions contained malicious code or ‘malware’, according to recent research from the Online Trust Alliance (OTA).

The OTA found that 19,000 incidents of malvertising occurred across 3,500 sites and 200 unique ad networks last year. Based on the average number of ad impressions served per incident in a typical 3-day period (the average time a malvertising campaign runs before it’s identified and stopped) the total number of ad impressions carrying malware came to around 10.8 billion.

Instructing people to register a trademark-infringing domain name may be just as unlawful as registering a domain name that infringes someone’s trademark, according to a ruling by U.S. Federal Judge Ricardo Martinez.

Judge Martinez has found in favor of Microsoft in its lawsuit against Internet marketing ‘gurus’ Amish Shah, Jose A. Rivera a.k.a. Jay Styles and their related corporations Digispace Solutions LLC and YMultimedia LLC.

Mozilla’s Firefox 4.0 (beta) has launched with a ‘do-not-track feature’ that lets users tell websites they don’t want to be tracked.

By selecting a check-box labeled ‘Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked’ a user will cause Firefox to broadcast a HTTP header to a given website, indicating they don’t want to be tracked.

Internet marketers who promote products and services in the U.K. take note: from March 1, 2011, the U.K. Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) will govern Internet marketing, and all such marketing will need to comply with the UK Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (CAP Code).

As a domain name owner or investor, the last thing you want to receive is a nasty lawyer’s letter demanding that you give up your domain name because it infringes some company’s trademark.

The good news is that if you use Domainer Income when evaluating domain names to buy, you’ll now be able to check whether or not your domain name matches a registered trademark.

Last week, both the McDonald’s fast food restaurant company and the Walgreens pharmacy chain reported that their email lists had been hacked.

McDonald’s said that an email service provider retained by its digital agency, Arc Worldwide, had its systems compromised by an unauthorized third party. The hack attack potentially exposed customers’ email information, names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and genders.

IT security vendor McAfee has released its annual ‘Mapping the Mal Web’ report which lists the ‘riskiest’ top level domains (TLDs). Surprise, surprise, topping the list are the .com and .info TLDs.

McAfee measures risk in terms of the likelihood of a given domain exposing visitors to malicious or potentially dangerous content and activities. These include malware, browser exploits, phishing, spamminess and risky affiliations.

According to McAfee’s findings, the top 10 riskiest TLDs and their associated risk weightings are as follows:

Facebook is suing advertising network Max Bounty, Inc. and two individuals – Steven Richter and Jason Swan – of using deceptive practices to trick Facebook members into handing over their personal information, sending spam to friends, or signing up for fake offers.

Explaining the lawsuits, the Facebook Security team said:

It seems that a few not-so-scrupulous Internet marketers and their clients are in the market for Facebook user IDs.

According to ClickZ, digital agency aimClear recently turned down a client request to get Facebook user IDs, although it still told the client how it could scrape user IDs from one of the Facebook templates.

Retail Decisions (ReD), which provides payment fraud prevention solutions, estimates that U.S. online credit card fraud could be 32 percent higher in 2010 than in 2009.

Carl Clump, CEO of ReD, says the huge increase in online credit card crime – consisting of fraudulent attempts to buy goods on the internet, by mail order or by telephone – is likely to increase as the U.S. economic recession persists. He said: