Malvertising campaign MasquerAds abuses Google Ads

Experts warn of a new Malvertising Campaign abusing Google Ads that targets users searching for popular software.

Guardio Labs researchers uncovered a malvertising campaign, tracked as MasquerAds and attributed to a threat actor known as Vermux, that is abusing Google Ads to target users that are searching for popular software.

The campaign aims at delivering tainted versions of popular software that deploy malicious payloads on the user’s machine, including info-stealing malware such as Raccoon Stealer and Vidar.

The threat actors behind this campaign used domains with typosquatted names that appeared on top of Google search results.

The attacker used a set of benign sites, which were designed to trick visitors into clicking on them, and then redirect them to rogue sites.

“The trick is simple — creating a benign site to be promoted with the wanted keyword and keeping it valid and safe in the eyes of the policy enforcer.”…