click hijacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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...

In October 2013, Microsoft adopted a silent, offensive method to tackle infection due to a Tor-based botnet malware called ' Sefnit '. In an effort to takedown of the Sefnit botnet to protect windows users, Microsoft r emotely removes the older versions of installed Tor Browser software and infection from 2 Million systems, even without the knowledge of the system's owner. Last year in August, after Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency's ( NSA ) Spying programs, the Internet users were under fear of being spied. During the same time Tor Project leaders noticed almost 600% increase in the number of users over the anonymizing networks of Tor i.e. More than 600,000 users join Tor within few weeks. In September, researchers identified the major reason of increased Tor users i.e. A Tor-based botnet called ' Sefnit malware ', which was infecting millions of computers for click fraud and bitcoin mining. To achieve the maximum number...

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...

Remember the DNS Changer malware that infected at least four million computers in more than 100 countries, including 500,000 in the United States, with malicious software or malware ? Valeri Aleksejev, 32 years old from Estonia, is the first of the seven individuals to enter a plea, admitting his guilt for his role in the global scam that netted approximately $14 million. He faces up to 25 years in prison, deportation and the forfeiture of $7 million. The other six individuals have been named as Anton Ivanov, Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorov, Konstantin Poltev, and Andrey Taame.  Alekseev was the first large-scale Internet fraud criminal case came to trial. The scam had several components, including a click-hijacking fraud in which Malware was delivered to victims' PCs when they visited specially crafted websites or when they downloaded phony video codec software. The malware changed the DNS settings of the infected computers, and even in...