I’ve received numerous complaints via email, social media, and forums regarding a website that poses a significant threat to our community. The site in question is https://notepad.plus/ which appears prominently when users google for “download Notepad++”.

In recent weeks, we have noted an increase in malvertising campaigns via Google searches. Several of the threat actors we are tracking have improved their techniques to evade detection throughout the delivery chain.

We believe this evolution will have a real world impact among corporate users getting compromised via malicious ads eventually leading to the deployment of malware and ransomware.

In this blog post, we look at a malvertising campaign that seems to have flown under the radar entirely for at least several months. It is unique in its way to fingerprint users and distribute time sensitive payloads.