Scroll Top

Malvertising steps up a gear as criminals use Google Ads to con victims

Futurist_malverts

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Thinking about clicking that Google ad for that thing you’re interested in? It could be a scam in disguise …

 

Love the Exponential Future? Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, read about exponential tech and trendsconnect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog.

Yet another growing trend in the cyber security space details have emerged about a new highly targeted and sophisticated Malvertising campaign that leverages Google Ads to direct users searching for popular software to fictitious landing pages and distribute next-stage payloads. Malwarebytes, which discovered the activity, said it’s “unique in its way to fingerprint users and distribute time sensitive payloads.”

 

RELATED
T-Mobile teams with crypto carrier Helium to help people make money on the side

 

The attack singles out users searching for Notepad++ and PDF converters to serve bogus ads on the Google search results page that, when clicked, filters out bots and other unintended IP addresses by showing a decoy site.

Should the visitor be deemed of interest to the threat actor, the victim is redirected to a replica website advertising the software, while silently fingerprinting the system to determine if the request is originating from a virtual machine.

Users who fail the check are taken to the legitimate Notepad++ website, while a potential target is assigned a unique ID for “tracking purposes but also to make each download unique and time sensitive.”

The final-stage malware is an HTA payload that establishes a connection to a remote domain (“mybigeye[.]icu”) on a custom port and serves follow-on malware.

 

RELATED
H2 Clipper wants to use robot swarms to build giant airships

 

“Threat actors are successfully applying evasion techniques that bypass ad verification checks and allow them to target certain types of victims,” Jérôme Segura, director of threat intelligence, said.

“With a reliable malware delivery chain in hand, malicious actors can focus on improving their decoy pages and craft custom malware payloads.”

The disclosure overlaps with a similar campaign that targets users searching for the KeePass password manager with malicious ads that direct victims to a domain using Punycode (keepass[.]info vs. ķeepass[.]info ), a special encoding used to convert Unicode characters to ASCII.

“People who click on the ad will be redirected via a cloaking service that is meant to filter sandboxes, bots, and anyone not deemed to be a genuine victim,” Segura noted. “The threat actors have set up a temporary domain at keepasstacking[.]site that performs the conditional redirect to the final destination.”

 

RELATED
New breathable insulin becomes a popular choice for diabetics in the US

 

Users who land on the decoy site are tricked into downloading a malicious installer that ultimately leads to the execution of FakeBat (aka EugenLoader), a loader engineered to download other malicious code.

 

The abuse of Punycode is not entirely novel, but combining it with rogue Google Ads is a sign that malvertising via search engines is getting more sophisticated. By employing Punycode to register similar domain names as a legitimate site, the goal is to pull off a homograph attack and lure victims into installing malware.

“While Punycode with internationalised domain names has been used for years by threat actors to phish victims, it shows how effective it remains in the context of brand impersonation via malvertising,” Segura said.

Speaking of visual trickery, multiple threat actors – TA569 (aka SocGholish), RogueRaticate (FakeSG), ZPHP (SmartApeSG), ClearFake, and EtherHiding – have been observed taking advantage of themes related to fake browser updates to propagate Cobalt Strike, loaders, stealers, and remote access trojans, a sign that these attacks are a constant, evolving threat.

 

RELATED
Brain scan experiment detects guilt, opens the way for pre-crime tech

 

“Fake browser updates abuse end user trust with compromised websites and a lure customized to the user’s browser to legitimize the update and fool users into clicking,” Proofpoint researcher Dusty Miller said in an analysis published this week.

“The threat is only in the browser and can be initiated by a click from a legitimate and expected email, social media site, search engine query, or even just navigating to the compromised site.”

Related Posts

Leave a comment

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This