All you need to know about the growing popularity of Malvertising

Every morning, without fail, you check your mail, read the news, look through your accounts in social networks. In this case, it is likely that you will encounter several pop-up windows containing advertisements, which you will quickly close, because they only get on your nerves.

But it is likely that you still do not know that these annoying advertisements can install a malicious program on your computer without your knowledge or without the knowledge of the company that manages these banners and advertisements.
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Malvertising is a technique that quickly gained popularity among cyber criminals. According to security experts , the volume of malicious advertising over the past, 2015 increased by 325% .

Unlike adware that fills your pages with toolbars, often not always malicious, cyber criminals use malicious ads to hide malicious code in an ad, and therefore you don’t even need to click on a banner to get infected .

The method of carrying out such an attack is surprisingly simple: a cyber-criminal penetrates into the network of a company that carries out online sales of advertising space, and receives information about the customers of this company. Then the hacker impersonates another client and places his own advertisements, and they may contain malicious code in Javascript.



After the user has loaded the page, seemingly innocent advertisements appear on it. Even without clicks on them, a special exploit is launched that installs the malicious program on the computer. In the end, you may also run into bank trojans.

Cyber ​​criminals have been using the Malvertising technique for several years now, and in 2009, The New York Times faced an attack of this kind, when a pop-up window posed as an anti-virus scanner and infected users' computers .

Last September, The Huffington Post also became a victim of Malvertising. After some time, the British tabloid The Daily Mail inadvertently redirected its readers to a set of exploits that installed malware on their computers. Yahoo and Forbes also faced similar problems as well-known adult sites YouPorn and Pornhub.

As these cases show, cyber criminals prefer to launch their attacks on popular websites, which have huge traffic, in order to infect the maximum possible number of computers.

So, if cyber criminals use advertisements on websites that we generally trust in security, then what can advertising agencies do to combat these threats and what can we do to protect ourselves?

The well-known platform Doubleclick , which is owned by Google, in 2014 alone closed 524 million malicious advertisements . Representatives of this company cited the fact that they use special means of protection against malicious programs in their fight against cyber criminals.

For their part, websites that have been infected can create their own advertisements or use sponsored content to protect their readers, although at the moment it does not look like a viable solution, because outdoor advertising is necessary for them to survive.

Thus, at the moment, the best way to protect yourself from such attacks is to install an ad blocker like Adblock , update Java from the official web resource, constantly update your browser and always use antivirus.