Cybercriminals frequently use fake search engine listings to take advantage of our trust in popular brands, and then scam us. It often starts, as with so many attacks, with a sponsored search result on Google.
In the latest example of this type of scam, we found tech support scammers hijacking the results of people looking for 24/7 support for Apple, Bank of America, Facebook, HP, Microsoft, Netflix, and PayPal. Here’s how it works: Cybercriminals pay for a sponsored ad on Google pretending to be a major brand. Often, this ad leads people to a fake website. However, in the cases we recently found, the visitor is taken to the legitimate site with a small difference.
Read more…
Source: Malwarebytes Labz
Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.
Related:
- Gootkit malware returns to life alongside REvil ransomware
November 30, 2020
After a year-long vacation, the Gootkit information-stealing Trojan has returned to life alongside REvil Ransomware in a new campaign targeting Germany. The Gootkit Trojan is Javascript-based malware that performs various malicious activities, including remote access for threat actors, keystroke capturing, video recording, email theft, password theft, and the ability to inject malicious scripts to steal online ...
- A hacker is selling access to the email accounts of hundreds of C-level executives
November 30, 2020
A threat actor is currently selling passwords for the email accounts of hundreds of C-level executives at companies across the world. The data is being sold on a closed-access underground forum for Russian-speaking hackers named Exploit.in, ZDNet has learned this week. The threat actor is selling email and password combinations for Office 365 and Microsoft accounts, which ...
- Four years after the Dyn DDoS attack, critical DNS dependencies have only gone up
November 30, 2020
In 2016, Dyn, a provider of managed DNS servers, was the victim of a massive DDoS attack that crippled the company’s operations and took down domain-name-resolving operations for more than 175,000 websites. While some sites managed to stay up by activating a redundancy and switching DNS resolving to secondary servers, many websites were not prepared and ...
- IIoT chip maker Advantech hit by ransomware, $12.5 million ransom
November 28, 2020
The Conti ransomware gang hit the systems of industrial automation and Industrial IoT (IIoT) chip maker Advantech and is now demanding a $14 million ransom to decrypt affected systems and to stop leaking stolen company data. Advantech is a global leading manufacturer of IT products and solutions, including embedded PCs, network devices, IoT, servers, and healthcare ...
- Personal data of 16 million Brazilian COVID-19 patients exposed online
November 26, 2020
The personal and health information of more than 16 million Brazilian COVID-19 patients has been leaked online after a hospital employee uploaded a spreadsheet with usernames, passwords, and access keys to sensitive government systems on GitHub this month. Among the systems that had credentials exposed were E-SUS-VE and Sivep-Gripe, two government databases used to store data ...
- Ransomware hits largest US fertility network, patient data stolen
November 26, 2020
US Fertility, the largest network of fertility centers in the U.S., says that some of its systems were encrypted in a ransomware attack that affected the company two months ago, in September 2020. The US Fertility (USF) network is comprised of 55 locations across 10 states that completed almost 25,000 IVF cycles in 2018 through its ...

