Cyber-terrorist who covertly exploit an internet user's CPU power to my own cryptocurrencies have found a new way to do the job -- through Youtube.com ads.
It is no secret that despite it's constantly rising and falling market value, digital currencies now cost a lot of money. This is why it is far from surprising that many internet crooks are taking advantage of unsuspecting customers to earn a lot of them.
This month, security researchers from Tendency Micro discovered the hackers' scheme that they called a "malvertising campaign. " As the name suggests, perpetrators use ads to covertly mine cryptocurrencies using the JavaScript language Cognitive.
"Attackers abused Google's DoubleClick, which develops and provides web ad serving services, for traffic distribution. Data through the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network shows affected nations include Japan, France, Taiwan, Italy, and Spain, inches Trend Micro's researchers explained in the company's blog.
Within the same blog post, it was also revealed that Trend Micro experienced noticed a massive spike in Cognitive mining activity upon Jan. 24, which was increased by up to 285 % compared to their normal operations. After further digging, the actual researchers found that these abnormal activities had actually begun on Jan. 18 where "five malicious domains" did find a higher mining traffic. This means the malvertising campaign gone unnoticed for at least a week.
Trend Micro researchers added: "An analysis of the advertisement-riddled pages revealed two different internet miner scripts embedded and a script that displays similar from DoubleClick. The affected webpage will show the genuine advertisement while the two web miners covertly perform their own task. "
YouTube advertisements are good targets for cryptocurrency mining since people using the platform tend to stay in this for longer periods compared to targeting specific websites wherever users can just come and go after reading or even getting the information they need.
In light of this discovery, users are encouraged to install security patches when they are available. For a higher level of safety, people can also choose to disable applications running on JavaScript from opening in their browsers.
Meanwhile, Trend Micro informed Google of their findings before they were published. A someone for Google told Media Post: "We enforce our own policies through a multi-layered detection system across our systems which we update as new threats emerge. very well
The spokesperson then added: "In this case, the advertisements were blocked in less than two hours and the malicious stars were quickly removed from our platforms. "
The use of Cognitive JavaScript has been a favorite option for hackers because they are simpler to apply to a domain without getting detected right away. The same tool once was used by a hacker who altered the official website associated with cable network Showtime and the Google Chrome Extension called Store Poster.
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