Besides technology, scam tactics are among the things that evolve pretty rapidly and some would say creatively. There’s a high chance of you getting scammed the second you opened the internet. 

Recently, cybercriminals are finding a new way to step up their game. Malwarebytes, a cybersecurity company reported that they detected a major malvertising campaign going around, exploiting Google Ads to lure their victims. Considering that most people resort to Google as their main web browser, the campaign poses a big threat to both users and Google since it is able to produce ads that are disguised as one of the giant companies so it would be difficult to tell a difference. It can easily spread malicious malware, phishing pages or other cyber attacks. 

Here’s how this scam works.

If you search for “YouTube” related keywords, The first advertisements that will appear top of the page is ‘YouTube-Best of YouTube videos’ or ‘YouTube.com-YouTube-Best of YouTube videos for You.’ By a glance, you can’t really tell that it’s fake since it uses the correct youtube.com URL. 

But, once you clicked on the fake link, it will direct you to a tech support scam pretending to be a security alert from Windows Defender. Other than YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and Walmart are among the popular searches that the cybercriminals made use of for the campaign. 

Usually, the scammers would ‘lock’ your computer and tell you that it is infected. To resolve that, you have to purchase a support license that probably going to cost you a lot but provides no benefit whatsoever. Since Malwarebytes reported that the campaign is still actively running, users need to be extra vigilant in utilizing the internet.

Source: Bleepingcomputer