Topic
Malvertising is the use of online ads or ad networks to spread malware or redirect victims to malicious sites via compromised or fake placements.
Citizen Lab says ads from Israeli firm DiscoverTech delivered no-click spyware to at least 45 Al Jazeera devices in 2024 and 2025. Wired reports that, by Citizen Lab's account, individuals can do little beyond blocking ads as thoroughly as possible.
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Citizen Lab said Discover-Tech's ads delivered zero-click Candiru attacks to at least 45 Al Jazeera devices. Google and IAB Europe have delisted the vendor, but Citizen Lab cannot yet attribute the attacks to any party.
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Two tech-support scams ran ads in AT&T's Yahoo Mail on Oct 7 and 8 that showed a fake Microsoft alert only to Windows desktops on home broadband. In scans by Tuxxin's Daniel Jones, visits from a data center and a phone got an ordinary dating or finance article.
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Attackers route Google ads through Bing's click-tracking redirect to show bing.com and send Mac users to a fake Claude installer, Push Security found. The setup appears built to pass ad vetting, so the domain an ad displays no longer says where a click lands.
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Fake Ledger sites in Google results are asking for recovery phrases while Ledger probes losses researchers put above $86 million. Nothing yet ties that sum to the pages, but the way the campaigns were built makes a top search result a working route into self-custody wallets.
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Zscaler found Ledger phishing ads running under a verified Google advertiser, with Vercel redirect domains rotating every 15 to 20 minutes. The ad displayed google.com and the pages sat on Google and Vercel hosting, so domain reputation and the verified badge gave defenders little to catch.
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Huntress traced a RAT campaign that hides its first-stage lure in a ChatGPT Custom GPT on the real chatgpt.com, across at least 40 incidents. Because the page sits on a trusted domain, blocking the ClickFix PowerShell paste is the control that works.
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CERT Polska tied 17 Google Play apps and 852 Meta ads to one Android toll-fraud operation aimed at Polish users. Its billing code arrived after install from an object-storage bucket. The public ad records told analysts more than the store listing did.
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Huntress traced at least two of more than 40 ClickFix malware incidents to fake custom GPTs on OpenAI's chatgpt.com. On that route every hop before the PowerShell command sat on a Google or OpenAI address, so staff taught to trust familiar domains would click through each one.
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Group-IB says the RemControl Android banking trojan reaches bank customers in six countries and the Middle East via Meta ads and fake Google Play pages. Its server address sits in a Telegram dead-drop, so the operator can move infrastructure without a new build.
Perspective Coverage
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Cato Networks says a sponsored ad outranked OpenAI's own page, sending macOS developers to a Google Sites portal whose ClickFix content lives on infrastructure Google never hosted.
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ThreatFabric traced the StreamRat dropper through four ordinary Android permission prompts to an Accessibility grant that hands operators keystrokes, credential overlays and remote control, with no infection count published.
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Check Point's deobfuscation of 23 compiled V8 bytecode samples shows JSCeal replaying stolen cookies inside the victim's own browser profile, then stuffing local credentials at any password prompt until it holds a fresh OAuth token.
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Hudson Rock and ADAMnetworks link the ads to an operation they call PasteSwitch, which hands Windows and macOS visitors different paste-this-command lures and swaps payloads on the backend depending on who arrives.
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Huntress and BleepingComputer describe sponsored ads that land on a real Claude Artifact page. The download link and the pasted curl command both reach elsewhere, so the trusted hostname never serves the payload.
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Huntress tracked nine months of malware campaigns run through shipped AI sharing features. Public Claude Artifacts, claude.ai/share links and indexable ChatGPT and Grok conversations all put the lure on a domain the victim already trusts.
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A genuine Carnival booking confirmation passed SPF, DKIM and DMARC and pointed at a promotional domain the company had let lapse. Someone re-registered it, wired it into a cloaking network, and the link kept routing for 74 days.
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Microsoft Threat Intelligence documents ChatGPT, Copilot, DeepSeek and Claude lures spanning phishing kits, adversary-in-the-middle credential theft, malvertising and fake GitHub installers. A broker it tracks as Storm-3075 resells the access it wins.
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NYU and Radboud researchers spent a year turning Google's Ads Transparency Center into a detector for deceptive software ads, and found that the report button removes a creative while leaving the domain behind it serving.
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Intel 471 found an unauthenticated panel called AppPanda running fake streaming lures behind paid Facebook ads, with affiliate tooling that re-signs the Android payload every hour and tracks ad spend the way a growth team would.
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Build · August 27, 2026 · One report1 publisher