These Google Ads Are Actually Malicious

Google ads can be a mild annoyance, or useful, if relevant to your search or general interests. However, occasionally, they can be malicious and dangerous, so you need to be on the lookout at all times. 

As reported by The Hacker News, there’s a new “malvertising” campaign, which tricks users looking for popular software into installing malware instead. 

In particular, this campaign targets users looking for Notepad++, as well as PDF converters. Bad actors pay for malicious ads purporting to lead users to sites offering this software, but when they click it, they’re silently investigated to see if their system is ideal for malware installation. If not, they are redirected to legitimate software sites. If so, however, hackers fingerprint their computer to track their activity, and then install malware on their system. 

That’s the danger with these decoy sites: they seem legitimate, so you download the software, which turns out to be either malware, or a system designed to install malware in the background. From there, hackers can do anything with the malware on your system: Perhaps they monitor your activity and steal your info, or they install processes to mine cryptocurrency, outsourcing the power consumption costs onto you. 

It’s a good reminder to always remain vigilant when browsing the internet. If you search for software on Google, for example, don’t click on any links marked “Ad.” Instead, scroll down and look for a link that is delivered on its own, and make sure it matches exactly what you’re looking for. If you know the website itself, enter that into the URL rather than perform a search.