Researchers at Canadian lab Citizen Lab have discovered that ordinary online advertisements can be used to silently install spyware on other people's devices. Using this scheme, hackers attacked at least 45 computers of the international television company Al Jazeera. The attack does not even require the victim to click on the advertisement.
Researchers at Canadian lab Citizen Lab have discovered that ordinary online advertisements can be used to silently install spyware on other people's devices. Using this scheme, hackers attacked at least 45 computers of the international television company Al Jazeera. The attack does not even require the victim to click on the advertisement.
This is reported by TechCrunch, citing a study by Citizen Lab.
The investigation focused on the Israeli company Discover-Tech, which positions itself as a regular advertising platform. However, researchers found that its platform was used by at least two spyware developers: Candiru and Bindecy.
The scheme works like this: attackers can target a specific person by their IP address, their device’s advertising ID, or their browser data. They then serve them an ad via an ad network that reaches the Discover-Tech server. The server then checks to see if the device is a legitimate target. If so, it can then deliver additional code that can exploit software vulnerabilities to infect the device with spyware.
The user doesn't have to click anything to do this. In addition, the ad sometimes loads in the background, so the person may not even be aware of its existence.
Discover-Tech itself helped expose the scheme. The company left the interface code of its Controlium platform publicly available. Thanks to this, researchers were able to recreate the control panel through which platform clients configured the display of ads to specific people. Open logs of system logins were also found on the company's website. Among the users, people associated with the developers of spyware Candiru and Bindecy were found.
Citizen Lab senior researcher Bill Marchak suggests that Discover-Tech may be just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers advise people at risk of being targeted by spyware to prevent apps from tracking their activity for advertising, use browsers with tracking protection, and install ad blockers.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that hackers linked to Russia were using legal advertising platforms to distribute malware.
