A massive malvertising campaign has been detected that has so far hijacked at least 300 million browser sessions in the space of just 48 hours.
What is Malvertising?
Malveristing is a method of generating traffic to websites that would otherwise be unlikely to be visited by Internet users. The technique involves using code in adverts submitted to advertising networks to redirect users to a specific website. Clicking a link in one of the adverts can trigger multiple redirects, first to the site detailed in the Ad code, then onto another web page.
Malvertising is often used to direct Internet users to malicious websites, such as those hosting exploit kits that probe for vulnerabilities and silently download malware or phishing websites, tech support scams, and other scam sites.
As spam filtering technology has improved, fewer spam emails are being delivered to inboxes, which means fewer individuals click links in emails and visit malicious websites. Malvertising is a suitable alternative that generates huge volumes of traffic.
The ad networks are used by many high-traffic websites to provide an additional income stream. While the ad networks incorporate checks to ensure advertisers are legitimate, the use of obfuscated JavaScript to redirect visitors and multiple redirects help attackers pass these checks.
Users Directed to Phishing Websites
The latest malvertising campaign is being used to direct Internet users to a variety of web pages, including adult websites and ‘You’ve Won a Gift Card’ scams.
The campaign was detected by researchers at Confiant on November 12. They claim the threat actors behind the campaign are still active. The initial web pages visited via advert redirects contain obfuscated JavaScript code that redirects visitors to other web pages. Many of the final landing pages phish for sensitive information such as names, addresses, email addresses, revenue information, and other personal data.
Malvertising is nothing new and there are more than a dozen threat actors that are primarily using this method to generate traffic to web pages, but this campaign stands out due to its scale and the volume of visitors that have been redirected to malicious websites.
How to Protect Your Business from Malvertising Attacks
As with spam email, malvertising is a serious risk for businesses. The majority of businesses now use a spam filtering solution to prevent malicious messages from reaching inboxes, but fewer businesses have protections in place to prevent their employees from malvertising and other web-based attacks.
Anti-virus and anti-malware solutions may identify malware downloads that take place through these malicious websites, but usually only once the malware has been downloaded. Since most AV solutions are signature-based, if a new malware variant is downloaded it will not be detected.
The most effective way of blocking malvertising is a web filtering solution. A web filter is most commonly used to control the types of content that can be accessed by employees and serves a similar purpose to parental control software. However, in contrast to parental control solutions, enterprise class-web filtering solutions also prevent network users from accessing malicious websites such as those used for phishing and to distribute malware.
WebTitan Cloud – An Easy to Use, Powerful Web Filtering Solution
WebTitan Cloud is an enterprise-class web filtering solution that has been developed to offer protection against web-based attacks, including malvertising.
WebTitan Cloud is a 100% cloud-based web filtering solution. As such, it requires no hardware purchases or software downloads. Implementation is quick and easy and only takes a few minutes. No technical skill is required to start filtering the Internet and start protecting your business from web-based threats.
In addition to blocking access to malicious websites, WebTitan Cloud allows users to restrict internet activity through 53 category-based filters. More than 700 million URLs are crawled, analyzed, and categorized every day, and the solution provides 100% coverage of the Alexa top 1 million most visited websites and blocks more than 3 million malicious URLS at any one time. More than 7,500 businesses around the world trust WebTitan to protect them from malicious web content.
WebTitan Cloud is also an ideal web filtering solution for managed service providers (MSPs), allowing them to easily add web filtering to their security stacks. WebTitan Cloud comes with a variety of hosting options, including the option of hosting the solution within an MSP’s own data center. The solution can also be provided as a white-label ready to take MSP branding.
For further information on WebTitan Cloud for managed service providers and SMBs, details of pricing, and to book a product demonstration, contact the TitanHQ team today.