Let Me Emphasize That Ad-Blockers Are Security Tools

Once again ad networks have been utilized to serve up malware:

According to a just-published post from Malwarebytes, a flurry of malvertising appeared over the weekend, almost out of the blue. It hit some of the biggest publishers in the business, including msn.com, nytimes.com, bbc.com, aol.com, my.xfinity.com, nfl.com, realtor.com, theweathernetwork.com, thehill.com, and newsweek.com. Affected networks included those owned by Google, AppNexis, AOL, and Rubicon. The attacks are flowing from two suspicious domains, including trackmytraffic[c],buz and talk915[.]pw.

The ads are also spreading on sites including answers.com, zerohedge.com, and infolinks.com, according to SpiderLabs. Legitimate mainstream sites receive the malware from domain names that are associated with compromised ad networks. The most widely seen domain name in the current campaign is brentsmedia[.]com. Whois records show it was owned by an online marketer until January 1, when the address expired. It was snapped up by its current owner on March 6, a day before the malicious ad onslaught started.

In this case the attacks appear to be originated from domains of ad networks that had been allowed to expire. After being allowed to expire the domains were snapped up by malware distributors. This allowed them to distribute malware to visitors of sites that still allowed ads from those expired domains.

Ad networks have become an appealing target for malware distributors. By compromising a single ad network a malware distributor can successfully target users across many websites. It offers a much better return on investment than compromising a single large website such as the New York Times and the BBC. Compromising ad networks is often easier than compromising large websites as well since operators of large websites often have skilled administrators on hand that keep things fairly locked down. The fact that advertising companies come and go with notable frequency also makes life difficult for site administrators. In this case the purchased domains likely were legitimate ad networks at one time and simply vanished without anybody noticing. Since nobody noticed they weren’t removed from any of the ad distribution networks and could therefore still serve up ads to legitimate sites.

This event, if nothing else, should serve as a reminder that ad blockers are security tools.

One thought on “Let Me Emphasize That Ad-Blockers Are Security Tools”

  1. They certainly are. I have a Raspberry Pi running as a DNS Server and ad blocker. I had some friends who had their WoW accounts hacked nearly a decade ago because they viewed malicious ads.

    Since then I’ve been very vigilant in blocking ads, javascript and not installing Adobe flash.

    If they really want me to view ads then they need to find a secure way to do it. I’m not holding my breath.

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