Malvertising, the combination of the words malware and advertising, is an attack where criminals booby-trap a legitimate, trusted website with a malicious code by sneaking it in through a third party advertising network. Unfortunately, legitimate web advertising services haven’t been very discerning with the ads they allow their “customers” to upload to their networks.
Prediction video link: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ps2ylLVGyCc
As a result, criminals have paid for advertising services in order to sneak malicious code onto all the legitimate web sites that use that service. Over the past two years, this has been a very successful technique for cyber criminals to redirect innocent users browsing the web to their malicious drive-by download sites.
The good news is a number of reputation services and security products have become better at detecting malicious advertisements, and preventing your users from getting redirected to these evil sites. However, the criminals are fighting back. They have started to implement a number of techniques to obfuscate their malicious web code, including encoding their malicious JavaScript or by burying their attack in a Shockwave video file. The most recent obfuscation technique is the simplest—they serve their malicious advertisement over HTTPS.
In 2016, expect malvertising attempts to triple and for it to succeed more regularly due to its use of HTTPS. Criminals know that security products and companies are keeping on the look out for malicious ads. They also know that many security controls cannot see into HTTPS traffic. By encrypting their malvertising campaigns, they hope to bypass most detections next year. If you don’t have security controls that can monitor HTTPS, you should update as soon as you can.
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