Scareware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have unmasked a novel ad fraud scheme that has been found to leverage search engine poisoning (SEO) techniques and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content to push deceptive news stories into Google's Discover feed and trick users into enabling persistent browser notifications that lead to scareware and financial scams. The campaign, which has been found to target the personalized content feeds of Android and Chrome users, has been codenamed Pushpaganda by HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team. "This operation, named for push notifications central to the scheme, generates invalid organic traffic from real mobile devices by tricking users into subscribing to enabling notifications that presented alarming messages," researchers Louisa Abel, Vikas Parthasarathy, João Santos, and Adam Sell said in a report shared with The Hacker News. At its peak, about 240 million bid requests have been associated wit...

In this year's annual event, Apple announced that the company had paid out $70 Billion to developers in the App Store's lifetime and that $21 Billion of the amount was paid in the last year alone. But has all this money gone to the legitimate app developers? Probably not, as app developer Johnny Lin last week analyzed the Apple's App Store and discovered that most of the trending apps on the app store are completely fake and are earning their makers hundreds of thousands of dollars through in-app purchases and subscriptions. Scammers Use 'Search Ads' Platform to Boost App Ranking Shady developers are abusing Apple's relatively new and immature App Store Search Ads, which was launched at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), to promote their app in the store by using a few strategically chosen search ads and a bit of SEO. "They're taking advantage of the fact that there's no filtering or approval process for ads, and ...

With the rise in mobile market, last year we have seen sharp growth in malicious ' adware ' — the most prevalent mobile threat in the world. And now, security researchers have once again found Google Play Store offering malicious apps that are infecting millions of Android users with adware . It’s not at all surprising that the Android operating system is surrounded by a number of unwanted intrusions that may gain users’ attention to fall victim for one, but this issue might be even worse than we thought. WHAT IS ADWARE ? For those not familiar with adware, adware is a software that automatically displays or downloads advertising material like banners or pop-ups when a user is online. Doesn’t sound dangerous, Right? But adware could result in a serious threat to users. Android Adware can pose a major threat to users' privacy, since some ad networks gather personal information like phone number, email address, and many more. Depending on where the ad netwo...

If we talk about old days, a hacker often rely on the natural helpfulness as well as weaknesses of people whom he wanted to target. This tactic to break into a computer network by gaining the confidence of an authorized user and get them to reveal information that compromises the network's security is known as Social Engineering . WHAT IS SOCIAL ENGINEERING Social engineering is nothing but a non technical kind of intrusion that relies heavily on human interaction and involves manipulating people so they give up confidential information. Social engineering was very effective those old days as well as today, as major targets are made victims using this old trick only and it is also one of the important components of many types of exploits like: Virus writers use social engineering tactics to persuade people to run malicious email attachments Phishers use social engineering tactics to convince people to disclose their sensitive information such as banking credentia...