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The article about the Adware Trojan Xavier is interesting enough, and of course the writer recommends that we should use Trend Micro's security software to defend ourselves from such attacks. Although in your blogger's humble opinion authorities could do more to defend us against such Adware by acting to take down servers that clearly and obviously commission Adware Trojans to infiltrate user's systems. Typical examples are the www-searching scumbags described in more detail here , who still quite blatantly advertise their website. [Note: if your computer is not secure, I recommend that you do not go looking for www-searching.com, and that you keep well away from any of their sites or their associates.]
In the other article Exploring the Online Economy that Fuels Fake News, three research analysts give some examples of how fake news is propagated and how it has recently become so effective.
According to them, some of the attempts at manipulation of public opinion with semi-automated fake news bots use techniques created by the military to mount cyber attacks. This is the "Cyber Kill Chain", which is a method or a list of steps used to find, fix, track, target, engage and then assess cyber attacks.
However, their article implies that the Cyber Kill Chain was invented by Lockheed Martin. In fact Lockheed Martin were better known for developing a defense against the Cyber Kill Chain known as "Breaking The Cyber Kill Chain".
Nevertheless it easy to believe that the upsurge of fake news is probably the result of the application of theories regarding the weaponization of digital and information technology. In fact the history of propaganda ... Going back as far as the history of communication.
In the past this type of propaganda was called misinformation and then more recently (around WWII) the term disinformation was used to describe a deliberate campaign of false information designed to confuse an opponent.
Computer Technology, can like previous communications technologies be weoponized and some would say has far greater potential than older technologies. Although the main reason for this article seems to be to advertise their paper on Fake New, it does give some interesting examples of possible price for mounting and deploying a Fake News attack.