click fraud | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

More than 8,000 domains and 13,000 subdomains belonging to legitimate brands and institutions have been hijacked as part of a sophisticated distribution architecture for spam proliferation and click monetization. Guardio Labs is tracking the coordinated malicious activity, which has been ongoing since at least September 2022, under the name SubdoMailing. The emails range from "counterfeit package delivery alerts to outright phishing for account credentials." The Israeli security company attributed the campaign to a threat actor it calls  ResurrecAds , which is known to resuscitate dead domains of or affiliated with big brands with the end goal of manipulating the digital advertising ecosystem for nefarious gains. "'ResurrecAds' manages an extensive infrastructure encompassing a wide array of hosts, SMTP servers, IP addresses, and even private residential ISP connections, alongside many additional owned domain names," security researchers Nati Tal and Ole...

A new malware capable of controlling social media accounts is being distributed through Microsoft's official app store in the form of trojanized gaming apps, infecting more than 5,000 Windows machines in Sweden, Bulgaria, Russia, Bermuda, and Spain. Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point dubbed the malware "Electron Bot," in reference to a command-and-control (C2) domain used in recent campaigns. The identity of the attackers is not known, but evidence suggests that they could be based out of Bulgaria. "Electron Bot is a modular SEO poisoning malware, which is used for social media promotion and click fraud," Check Point's Moshe Marelus  said  in a report published this week. "It is mainly distributed via the Microsoft store platform and dropped from dozens of infected applications, mostly games, which are constantly uploaded by the attackers." The first sign of malicious activity commenced as an ad clicker campaign that was discovered in O...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

More than 50 Android apps on the Google Play Store—most of which were designed for kids and had racked up almost 1 million downloads between them—have been caught using a new trick to secretly click on ads without the knowledge of smartphone users. Dubbed " Tekya ," the malware in the apps imitated users' actions to click ads from advertising networks such as Google's AdMob, AppLovin', Facebook, and Unity, cybersecurity firm Check Point Research noted in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Twenty four of the infected apps were aimed at children (ranging from puzzles to racing games), with the rest being utility apps (such as cooking apps, calculators, downloaders, translators, and so on)," the researchers said. While the offending apps have been removed from Google Play, the find by Check Point Research is the latest in an avalanche of ad fraud schemes that have plagued the app storefront in recent years, with malware posing as optimizer an...

Facebook has filed a lawsuit against two shady Android app developers accused of making illegal money by hijacking users' smartphones to fraudulently click on Facebook ads. According to Facebook, Hong Kong-based 'LionMobi' and Singapore-based 'JediMobi' app developers were distributing malicious Android apps via the official Google Play Store that exploit a technique known as "click injection fraud." Click injection is a type of attribution fraud where fraudsters manipulate the attributions to steal the credit from the actual source of app installation in an advertising process that involves Cost Per Installation model. In simple words, a malicious app installed on a device automatically generates a fake click to the advertisement network with its own tracking codes when it finds that the user is installing a new app from any other source to claim itself as the source of the installation. Therefore, Advertisers end up paying commission to the wro...

The biggest advertising fraud ever! A group of hackers is making between $3 Million to $5 Million per day from United States brands and media companies in the biggest digital ad fraud ever discovered. Online fraud-prevention firm White Ops uncovered this new Ad fraud campaign, dubbed " Methbot ," that automatically generates more than 300 Million fraudulent video ad impressions every day. The cyber criminal gang, dubbed AFT13, has developed Methbot robo-browser that spoofs all the necessary interactions needed to initiate, carry out and complete the ad transactions. The hackers, allegedly based in Russia, registered more than 6,000 domains and 250,267 distinct URLs impersonating brand and names of high-profile websites like ESPN, Vogue, CBS Sports, Fox News and the Huffington Post, and selling fake video ad slots. Cyber criminals behind Methbot are using servers hosted in Texas and Amsterdam to power more than 570,000 bots with forged IP addresses, mostly belong...

DDoS has become a game now that could knock any service offline. A Turkish hacking group is encouraging individuals to join its DDoS-for-Points platform that features points and prizes for carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a list of predetermined targets. The points earned can later be redeemed for various online click-fraud and hacking tools. Dubbed Sath-ı Müdafaa , translated as Surface Defense in English, this DDoS-for-Points platform is advertised via local Turkish hacking forums, including Turkhackteam and Root Developer. Surface Defense prompts other hackers in Turkey to sign up and asks them to attack political websites using a DDoS tool known as Balyoz , translated as Sledgehammer. According to Forcepoint security researchers, who discovered this program, Balyoz works via Tor and requires a username and password to log in. The tool then uses a DoS technique to flood targets with traffic. Here's How the Balyoz Tool Works On...

Before Ransomware, Click fraud was one of the popular and efficient ways for cybercriminals to make money and with the explosive growth in the size of the online threats it is still making its way on the Internet. " Click-Fraud " is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser's budget. Besides the search results, we all have seen advertisements placed in the search engine's WebPage. If the visitor clicks the Ad, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine. A problem that has arisen with pay-per-click is results in Click-Fraud. The term " fraud " is used because in either case, the advertiser is paying for a click without receiving any true value. Of course, the number of clicks has to be large enough in order to gain a considerable amount of money, and in order to do that an attacker can use an automated script or malicious program to simulate multiple clicks b...