It’s hard to keep track of the slew of malware, scams, phishing, and other deceptive internet practices in the world we know today. Cyber security researchers from the firm called Proofpoint have recently discovered malicious advertising activities on Pornhub.
Pornhub did take immediate action upon Proofpoint’s finding of the malware and has since taken measures to better protect against future attacks. Users experienced a pop-up saying they needed to download a required update in order to continue their current browsing. Sadly, millions of users took the pop-up as legitimate and became infected after the download.
It affected the very popular browsers including Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. The distributing of the malvertising software was complete once the user downloaded and installed the fake update, oblivious to what it was about to do to their system.
Similar malvertising infections have been operating on various other websites and continues to infect users today. Word to the wise: don’t download and install software just because an official looking window pops up telling you to. The group responsible for initiating the malware into the website’s coding calls themselves KovCoreG.
KovCoreG has been hacking sites and distributing malicious ad campaigns for quite some time now. Their main goal seems to be gaining revenue through click fraud but the Kovter malware the group has been distributing has the potential to be far more dangerous to both online businesses and their users.
It’s quite clear that the Kovter malware, if one were to modify it to do so, can become much more aggressive and able to steal personal data or even take control of one’s computer etc. The attackers were able to use various filters to cover their tracks and continue to remain active in the distributing of the Kovter malware.