Malware: Coming to a Computer in Front of You

The Register has an in-depth piece, Malware menaces poison ads as Google, Yahoo! look away, that’s worth your time. What’s malvertising?

Online advertising has become an increasingly potent threat to end-user security on the internet. More hackers than ever are targeting the internet’s money engine, using it as a powerful attack vector to hide exploits and compromise huge numbers of victims.

Malvertising, as poisoned ads are known, is as deadly as it is diverse. Hackers are able to poison advertisements with the world’s most capable exploit kits, then pay to have it served on a large number of prominent websites. Up to half of users exposed to the very worst forms of malvertising fall victim, yet tracking the attacks is often tricky. Advertisements are dynamic and served only to certain users, on certain websites, in certain conditions, making attacks difficult to study. […]

It is a scourge that, according to malvertising research, will inflict up to US$1 billion in damages this year, making the threat difficult to overstate. June was at the time the worst month for malvertising in history. The record was usurped the next month. Now some researchers say August might be next.

How is this so easy to accomplish, you ask?

Poisoned ads are a natural progression for net villains in search of a means for mass distribution of payload, according to Nick Bilogorskiy (@belogor), security research director of California-based Cyphort. “Unlike worms’ peer-to-peer viral approach, malvertising follows the one-to-many client-server approach, [where] attackers infect one advertising network and reach hundreds of websites that load ads from it, and millions of visitors to each of those websites,” Bilogorskiy says. “And they don’t even need to hijack or compromise the ad network – only need to buy an ad and obfuscate the malicious nature of the ad until it is reviewed by the ad censors.”

That, and:

The industry’s top malvertising experts are unanimous: For all intents and purposes, advertising companies have no idea who is buying their ads, and they make what amounts to no attempt to understand their customers. In an industry that moves fast and operates on tight margins, whitelisting and security checks seem costly and unwanted speed bumps.

There’s a lot more in the article about this phenomenon.

Increasingly, ad blockers are becoming tools of choice and necessity. A few tools we recommend: Firefox browser (desktop, Android), EFF’s Privacy Badger, Facebook Disconnect, and to see what personal info Facebook is sharing, check out I Shared What?! If you have favorites, please share your suggestions.

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