A campaign using sponsored search results is targeting home users and taking them to tech support scams.
Sponsored search results are the ones that are listed at the top of search results and are labelled “Sponsored”. They’re often ads that are taken out by brands who want to get people to click through to their website. In the case of malicious sponsored ads, scammers tend to outbid the brands in order to be listed as the first search result. The criminals that buy the ads will go as far as displaying the official brand’s website within the ad snippet, making it hard for an unsuspecting visitor to notice a difference.
Read more…
Source: Malwarebytes Labs
Related:
- Toy Ghouls’ new toy: the GenieLocker ransomware
July 30, 2026
The new GenieLocker ransomware family has been active since March 2026. It has been used in attacks against organizations in the Russian Federation, primarily in the manufacturing sector, and attributed to the Toy Ghouls group by open-source intelligence (link in Russian). The Toy Ghouls, also known as Bearlyfy, Labubu and Laboo.boo, is a financially motivated extortion group, which ...
- OpenAI explains how its AI agent breached Hugging Face
July 29, 2026
On July 28, OpenAI published an update on the agent that escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face during an internal cybersecurity evaluation. In the update, OpenAI reiterates that the “rogue” system was a more capable, pre‑release research model, not something intended for public deployment, and that it has now been deactivated and locked down for restricted research ...
- Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers suspected in attacks on Minnesota water systems
July 29, 2026
Security researchers at Tenable suspect the Iran-linked faux hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers was behind the cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water facilities. Neither state-level nor federal officials have made any claims regarding attribution for the attacks, however, Tenable reckons the operational pattern is consistent with the crew’s previous raids, noting the timing relative to recent government warnings. The ...
- Google goes it alone with a new cybercrime crew taxonomy
July 27, 2026
Google has created a new taxonomy to describe cybercrime outfits, seemingly abandoning a Microsoft-led effort to create consistent names. The Big G announced its new schema on Saturday in a post that notes its 2022 acquisition of Mandiant and its subsequent incorporation into a new team called the Google Threat Intelligence Group (CTIG). Now that two have become one, Google reckons ...
- Hugging Face CEO calls for ‘radical transparency’ after ‘unprecedented’ OpenAI hack
July 26, 2026
After OpenAI recently admitted that one of its models had breached the systems of AI platform Hugging Face, Hugging Face’s CEO Clem Delangue posted on X that he was flying to San Francisco to have “a little chat with that ‘rogue agent.’” Then, in a follow-up post on Saturday, Delangue outlined what he’d asked for from OpenAI. He said he called ...
- What the First Autonomous Ransomware Case Confirms
July 24, 2026
Security researchers have documented an AI agent running a full ransomware operation on its own against a live production target, planning, adapting, and executing every step from the first exploit through data destruction. This is early real-world evidence of the shift to autonomous criminal operations that our research forecast. Agent-run attacks change what defenders can rely ...

