A malvertising marketing campaign is abusing Google advertisements to impersonate Google’s whole product line, in line with researchers at Malwarebytes. The malicious advertisements are designed to lure victims right into a tech assist rip-off.
“Whereas model impersonation is often finished by way of monitoring templates, on this occasion the fraudsters relied on key phrase insertion to do the work for them,” Malwarebytes explains. “That is notably helpful when concentrating on a single firm and its whole portfolio.”
The scammers are abusing Looker Studio (one other Google product) to trick customers into considering one thing is flawed with their laptop. When a consumer clicks on the malicious advert, Looker Studio will show a full-screen picture of Google’s dwelling web page. This picture accommodates a hyperlink that can take the sufferer to a web page that shows a pretend Microsoft or Apple alert web page with a telephone quantity to name for assist. As soon as the scammer has the sufferer on the telephone, they’ll try and trick the sufferer into putting in malware or handing over delicate data.
Malwarebytes has reported this marketing campaign to Google, however the criminals can use the identical techniques to spin up comparable operations.
“Malicious advertisements could be mixed with various methods to evade detection from Google and defenders usually,” the researchers write. “Dynamic key phrase insertion could be abused to focus on a bigger viewers associated to the identical matter, which on this case was Google’s merchandise. Lastly, it’s value noting that on this explicit scheme, all net sources used from begin to end are offered by cloud suppliers, typically freed from cost. Meaning extra flexibility for the criminals whereas growing issue to dam.”
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Malwarebytes has the story.