New Malvertising Campaign Uses Fake Windows News Portal to Distribute Malicious Installers
Nov 09, 2023
Endpoint Security / Malware
A new malvertising campaign has been found to employ fake sites that masquerade as legitimate Windows news portal to propagate a malicious installer for a popular system profiling tool called CPU-Z. "This incident is a part of a larger malvertising campaign that targets other utilities like Notepad++, Citrix, and VNC Viewer as seen in its infrastructure (domain names) and cloaking templates used to avoid detection," Malwarebytes' Jérôme Segura said . While malvertising campaigns are known to set up replica sites advertising widely-used software, the latest activity marks a deviation in that the website mimics WindowsReport[.]com. The goal is to trick unsuspecting users searching for CPU-Z on search engines like Google by serving malicious ads that, when clicked, redirect them to the fake portal (workspace-app[.]online). At the same time, users who are not the intended victims of the campaign are served an innocuous blog with different articles, a technique known a...