We have recently written about malvertising campaigns that leverage Google paid advertisements to try and trick people into downloading malware instead of the software they were looking for. This malware then stole login credentials from the affected system.

SEO poisoning is gaining momentum as threat actors leverage malicious ads to deliver malware through web browser searches.

Malicious Google Ad -- Fake Notepad++ Page -- Aurora Stealer malware

Google Ads is one of the most popular advertising platform, but it's also a target for cybercriminals. Learn how they are using it to spread malware.

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.