Sergey Budaev

Ordinary targeted ads now infect your computer or smartphone without even clicking. Citizen Lab has discovered the AdFection technique: ordinary ad networks have now become powerful spyware delivery channels. Here is how it works: the device receives an ad from Discover-Tech, which routes the victim through a Candiru verification server, and ultimately the malware connects to a command-and-control server. An ad is displayed on your device and that’s it—you are infected.

Discover-Tech has long been a certified partner of Google and many other major IT companies. The online ad industry as a whole approved a massive spyware distribution system. Discover-Tech ads appeared on nearly 200,000 unique websites and in apps across many countries! Further, "Dark cartographer" is exploiting vulnerabilities in telecom operators’ systems via the Discover-Tech infrastructure to match ad identifiers with mobile numbers at a massive scale.

Read more here: https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/.

The conclusion is simple: Online ads is not just annoying images and banners, it is a dangerous system threatening everyone privacy and security, leaking your private data at an enormous scale. And the industry players and regulators proved to be inefficient in combating malware and spyware. Ad companies in fact have a major conflict of interest here. ALWAYS use ad blockers!

For example, one way to minimise the potential attack surface is to switch to Mozilla Firefox and install the uBlock Origin browser extension. Note that uBlock functionality has been significantly dagraded by Google on Chrome starting from version 139 because Google has a major conflict of interests: its business model is based on the capacity to leak data and shove ads down your throat.