​Google, Yahoo, Facebook Collaborate to Blacklist Bad Bots

The major tech companies including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! have joined their hands to launch a new program meant to block fake web traffic by blacklisting flagged IP addresses. Today, majority of data center traffic is non-human or illegitimate, so to fight against this issue the Trustworthy...

Google Helps Lead Effort Against Automated Traffic From Data Centers

Google is helping to lead a new effort to reduce the amount of fraudulent traffic that emanates from data centers and produces artificial clicks on ads. The collaborative initiative will rely on blacklists of known-bad IP addresses that Google and others maintain to help identify bots that are us...

Google Pulls ClickFraud App from Google Play

A malicious Android app spoofing the popular BatteryBot Pro app has been pulled from Google Play. Researchers at Zscaler reported the app, which had a package name of com.polaris.BatteryIndicatorPro. The app requested excessive permissions from the user in an attempt to get full control of an...

Adsense Click Fraud Monitoring <= 1.7.5 - XSS

XSS via the phpwhois https://github.com/phpWhois/phpWhois component, which is also affected by a RCE apparently https://github.com/phpWhois/phpWhois/issues/34. It is unclear whether or not the issue has been fixed in the plugin...

Angler Exploit Kit, Bedep Malware Inflating Video Views

A new sort of hacktivism emerged last week when experts from Trustwave published new research revealing that attackers are using the Angler exploit kit and the Bedep Trojan in order to drive artificial views to politically controversial videos. The motivation for the scheme, it appears, is to...

Malvertising Abuses Real-Time Bidding on Ad Networks

Dark corners of the Internet harbor trouble. They’re supposed to. But what about when Yahoo, CNN.com, TMZ and other busy destination sites heave disaster upon visitors? That’s the challenge posed by malvertising, the latest hacker Golden Goose used in cybercrime operations and even in some target...

ZeroAccess Returns, Resumes Click-Fraud Activity

Long thought dead, the peer-to-peer P2P ZeroAccess botnet has resurfaced, and as of just a few weeks ago, has returned to propagating click-fraud scams. Researchers with Dell’s SecureWorks revealed Wednesday that they witnessed the botnet restart itself from March 21 to July 2, 2014 and that...

Shellshock Worm Exploits Bash in QNAP NAS Devices

A worm exploiting network attached storage devices vulnerable to the Bash flaw is scanning the Internet for more victims. The worm opens a backdoor on QNAP devices, but to date it appears the attackers are using the exploit to run a click-fraud scam, in addition to maintaining persistence on owne...

Israeli Think-Tank Site Serves Sweet Orange Exploit

Attackers have compromised the website of a prominent Israel-based, Middle East foreign policy-focused think tank, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs JCPA. On Friday, researchers from Cyphort reported that the site was serving the Sweet Orange exploit kit via drive-by download. At the time o...

Malware Can Bypass Chrome Extension Security Feature Easily

Researchers have uncovered a new social engineering trick that leads users to a malicious extension from Google Chrome impersonating to deliver Adobe’s Flash Player in order to lure victims in a click fraud campaign. Security experts at TrendMicro believe that the malware is triggered by opening...

Malicious Advertisements Found on Java.com, Other High-Profile Sites

A New York-based online ad network company AppNexus, that provides a platform specializing in real-time online advertising, has again been spotted as the origin of a recent "malvertising" campaign that makes use of the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to malicious websites hosting the Aspr...

Java.com, TMZ Serving Malvertising Redirects to Angler Kit

Online ad network AppNexus has again been identified at the core of another malvertising campaign using the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to sites hosting the Asprox malware. Busy, popular websites including TMZ, Photobucket and Java.com in recent days have been serving malicious...

Beware! Cyber Criminals Spreading Click Fraud Trojan for Making Money

Before Ransomware, Click fraud was one of the popular and efficient ways for cybercriminals to make money and with the explosive growth in the size of the online threats it is still making its way on the Internet. “Click-Fraud” is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the...

Microsoft Identifies New Malware Dropping Sefnit Botnet

Plenty has been written about the Sefnit malware family and its favor with using Tor to mask communication, as well as the money it’s made for criminals via click-fraud schemes. Sefnit, however, has had a pair of accomplices that until recently were regarded as harmless programs by most security...

Click-Fraud Sefnit Variant Shuns Tor for SSH

Sefnit was the first malware family to shed light on the problem of botnets and other malicious code using the Tor anonymity network as a communication protocol. While others before and since have done the same, Sefnit made the biggest splash at the end of last summer when the botnet caused a 600...

Malware Attacks Against Linux 2.6 Websites

The risks presented by unsupported operating systems are being called out in a large-scale attack on hundreds of websites. Hackers have hit web servers running a version of the Linux 2.6 kernel released seven years ago. The result is a multistage attack where compromised websites are spiked with...

Microsoft, Kaspersky Shed Light on Sefnit Tor Botnet

Alarm bells went off last August when spikes in Tor client downloads were traced to a large click-fraud and Bitcoin-mining botnet called Sefnit. The malware was using the popular anonymity network to communicate with hackers in order to transmit stolen data and receive additional commands. In...

Chrome Pop-Up Warns Windows Users of Browser Hijacking

A rising number of online scams involve the modification of browser settings where a hacker spikes a free download or website with malware. The end result is generally a click-fraud scheme of some kind where the new browser settings might include spiked search engine pages or a new home page...

DailyMotion Hosting Malvertising Leading to Fake AV Attack

Video-sharing site DailyMotion, one of the most popular destinations on the Web, is in the throes of an attack where it is serving malicious ads redirecting users to a fake AV scam. Security firm Invincea reported the issue to the website, and as of 4 p.m. ET, DailyMotion was still serving the fa...

Yahoo Removes Ads Redirecting to Magnitude Exploit Kit

The race to replace the Blackhole Exploit Kit as the web exploit pack of choice for cybercriminals seems to have an early leader in Magnitude. Researchers at Dutch security firm Fox-IT reported over the weekend that European visitors to Yahoo were falling victim to malicious ads hosted on the sit...