Cyber criminals are now buying ad space on YouTube to deliver ransomware.–PC Pitstop
Ransomware In YouTube Ads
By Stu Sjouwerman, for KnowBe4.com Security Awareness Training
VirusBulletin reported that cyber criminals now spread around Cryptolocker / CryptoWall via YouTube. The cyber criminals purchase advertising space and use exploit kits to infect workstations, malware researchers Vadim Kotov and Rahul Kashyap discovered.
They ran into this while checking YouTube and website banners for situations where malware writers had in fact bought space to spread their malware on unpatched computers. The researchers wrote: “We conclude that ad networks could be leveraged to aid, or even be substituted for current exploit kits.”
YouTube Ad space turns out to be a cheap and efficient way to spread browser malware while using the powerful YouTube geo-targeting features. Unfortunately, this is a highly profitable criminal business model. The researchers stated there was very little advertising networks could do to prevent the attacks. Obviously YouTube (Google) is going to try hard but preventing this is not easy.
