Smut-watchers suckered by evil advertising

Security bods have closed off a malvertising campaign targeting an ad network spread through an ad network that targeted smut site P0rnHub.

The attacks exposed “millions of potential victims in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia”, said the Proofpoint researchers who discovered the attack.

Proofpoint said the campaign was waged by the KovCoreG group (distributor of the Kovter malware) for more than a year.

Kovter isn't new: it turned up in poisoned ad campaigns in 2015, and again earlier in 2017.

In the most recent campaign, Proofpoint said the campaign hooked users through fake Chrome/Firefox/IE browser updates (and a fake Flash update for good measure), and the attack was active for more than a year until the ad network, Traffic Junky, and the smut site lowered the boom.

“The chain begins with a malicious redirect hosted on avertizingms[.]com, which inserts a call hosted behind KeyCDN, a major content delivery network”, Proofpoint writes.

As an example of the obfuscation the campaign used, Chrome users were hit with a JavaScript which beaconed back to the attackers' server: this prevented analysts working through the infection chain if their IP hadn't checked in.

“This makes it extremely unlikely that the JavaScript can be run alone and provide the payload in a sandbox environment. This is most likely why this component of the chain has not been documented previously.”

“It should be noted that both P0rnHub and Traffic Junky acted swiftly to remediate this threat upon notification”, Proofpoint noted in its post. ®

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