“MasquerAds” — Google’s Ad-Words Massively Abused by Threat Actors, Targeting Organizations, GPUs and Crypto Wallets
A newly uncovered technique to abuse Google’s ad-words powerful advertisement platform is spreading rogue promoted search results in mass. Pointing to allegedly credible advertisement sites that are fully controlled by threat actors, those are used to masquerade and redirect ad-clickers to malicious phishing pages gaining the powerful credibility and targeting capabilities of Google’s search results. Adding customized malware payloads, threat actors are raising the bar for successful malware deployments on Personal PCs with ad words like Grammarly, Malwarebytes, and Afterburner as well as with Visual Studio, Zoom, Slack, and even Dashlane to target organizations.
Google ads lead to fake software pages pushing IcedID (Bokbot)
Fake sites for popular software have occasionally been used by cyber criminal groups to push malware. Campaigns pushing IcedID malware (also known as Bokbot) also use this method as a distribution technique (we also commonly see IcedID sent through email).
“MasquerAds” — Google’s Ad-Words Massively Abused by Threat Actors, Targeting Organizations, GPUs and Crypto Wallets
A newly uncovered technique to abuse Google’s ad-words powerful advertisement platform is spreading rogue promoted search results in mass. Pointing to allegedly credible advertisement sites that are fully controlled by threat actors, those are used to masquerade and redirect ad-clickers to malicious phishing pages gaining the powerful credibility and targeting capabilities of Google’s search results. Adding customized malware payloads, threat actors are raising the bar for successful malware deployments on Personal PCs with ad words like Grammarly, Malwarebytes, and Afterburner as well as with Visual Studio, Zoom, Slack, and even Dashlane to target organizations.
Google ads lead to fake software pages pushing IcedID (Bokbot)
Fake sites for popular software have occasionally been used by cyber criminal groups to push malware. Campaigns pushing IcedID malware (also known as Bokbot) also use this method as a distribution technique (we also commonly see IcedID sent through email).