Malvertising Assaults Strike PerezHilton, CBS and Blogger

PerezHilton.com the website for gossip news about celebrities and Hollywood recently delivered one fresh collection of malevolent advertisements on the computers of some one-half million visitors to the site. Previously too, pawning affected the site via malvertising attacks with the help of Angler Exploit Kit (AEK). According to Cyphort researcher Nick Bilogorskiy, the website has been diverting end-users onto the AEK.

All assaults occurred during late past week as well as the weekend that impacted various ad networks, implying that the distribution plan wasn't well-coordinated. The largest website attacked was the Blogger forum of Google, which according to Malwarebytes the U.S security company, delivered several advertisements via the PLYmedia forum.

Malwarebytes detected the malevolent advertisements as diverting end-users onto dual destinations. One, unintended web-pages harboring the AEK, and two, adult sites within user sign-up associate software.

But, a different infection is occurring this time, utilizing one other exploit kit; one other diverter from AOL such as adtechus.com while utilizing CDN, the Amazon Cloudfront for disseminating the malicious software. Following the usual installation of Bedep malware by Angler, there is more download such as of CryptXXX ransomware that contaminates the victim's PC.

VirusBulletin the security information site too reported of malicious advertising affecting the mentioned Blogger forum which diverted end-users onto sites facilitating tech support frauds. On these websites, criminals attempted at duping end-users into contacting bogus support centers over phone as well as paying for different applications or services they didn't require.

Bilogorskiy says many end-users have been securing themselves via disabling all ads. Almost 200m currently utilize Adblock, notes Statista. Such type of ad filtering, during 2015, cost publishers almost USD 22bn (15bn pounds), according to Bilogorskiy.

Likewise malicious ad campaigns have as well lately impacted CBS-affiliated television channels' news portals besides VirusBulletin and the Blogger forum. Scmagazine.com posted this dated May 10, 2016.

Within the just mentioned campaigns, criminals diverted end-users onto AEK that contaminated vulnerable PCs of end-users with the Bedep malicious program that in turn pulled down the CryptXXX ransom software. Dangerously, CryptXXX got upgraded to edition 2.0 that currently makes the malware far greater perilous.

» SPAMfighter News - 5/13/2016