Guardio Labs tracked and analyzed a large-scale fake captcha campaign distributing a disastrous Lumma info-stealer malware that circumvents general security measures like Safe Browsing. Entirely reliant on a single ad network for propagation, this campaign showcases the core mechanisms of malvertising — delivering over 1 million daily “ad impressions” and causing thousands of daily victims to lose their accounts and money through a network of 3,000+ content sites funneling traffic. Our research dissects this campaign and provides insights into the malvertising industry’s infrastructure, tactics, and key players.
Through a detailed analysis of redirect chains, obfuscated scripts, and Traffic Distribution Systems (TDS) — in collaboration with our friends at Infoblox — we traced the campaign’s origins to Monetag, a part of ProepllerAds’ network previously tracked by Infoblox under the name “Vane Viper.” Further investigation reveals how threat actors leveraged services like BeMob ad-tracking to cloak their malicious intent, showcasing the fragmented accountability in the ad ecosystem. This lack of oversight leaves internet users vulnerable and enables malvertising campaigns to flourish at scale.
Guardio Labs uncovers a sprawling campaign of subdomain hijacking, compromising already over 8,000 domains from esteemed brands and institutions, including MSN, VMware, McAfee, The Economist, Cornell University, CBS, Marvel, eBay and others. This malicious activity, dubbed “SubdoMailing”, leverages the trust associated with these domains to circulate spam and malicious phishing emails by the Millions each day, cunningly using their credibility and stolen resources to slip past security measures.
In our detailed analysis, we disclose how we detected this extensive subdomain hijacking effort, its mechanisms, its unprecedented scale and the main threat actor behind it. Furthermore, we developedthe “SubdoMailing” checker — a website designed to empower domain owners to reclaim control over their compromised assets and shield themselves against such pervasive threats. This report not only sheds light on the magnitude of the issue but also serves as a call to action for enhancing domain security against future exploits.
Explore the shift in phishing from Dark web to Telegram, where cybercriminals trade tools and data, and uncover Guardio's insights on countering this menace.
Facebook’s Messenger platform has been heavily abused in the past month to spread endless messages with malicious attachments from a swarm of fake and hijacked personal accounts. These threat actors are targeting millions of business accounts on Facebook’s platform — from highly-rated marketplace sellers to large corporations, with fake business inquiries, achieving a staggering “success rate” with approximately 1 out of 70 infected!
A newly uncovered technique to abuse Google’s ad-words powerful advertisement platform is spreading rogue promoted search results in mass. Pointing to allegedly credible advertisement sites that are fully controlled by threat actors, those are used to masquerade and redirect ad-clickers to malicious phishing pages gaining the powerful credibility and targeting capabilities of Google’s search results. Adding customized malware payloads, threat actors are raising the bar for successful malware deployments on Personal PCs with ad words like Grammarly, Malwarebytes, and Afterburner as well as with Visual Studio, Zoom, Slack, and even Dashlane to target organizations.
