What is "malvertising"?
GLOSSARY 20 Minuten hit the headlines because the popular online portal was spreading malware. There was talk of "melvertising" in this context. What exactly does this mean?
The malware on 20minuten.ch was spread via online advertising, among other things. Malvertising is a portmanteau of malware (malicious software) and advertising (online advertising). It refers to the distribution of malicious code via advertising banners, also known as adverts or ads for short, or entire advertising networks. malvertising is an attempt to infect private computers with malicious software. This can be done for various purposes. Criminals sometimes try to obtain sensitive information such as bank details or passwords or to gain control of one or more computers. An advertising agency or an entire network is infiltrated in order to distribute and launch scripts, programs or Flash applications using conventional advertising banners; if a user clicks on such an ad or loads a website with a malicious ad, a download or program can be launched or a script activated. Once this has happened, the user has hardly any chance of reacting appropriately to such an attack, as the malware has already activated itself by clicking on the banner.the consequences can be the following:- disclosure of private information- redirection to untrustworthy content- system crash- loss of a computer's admin rightsAn informative blog post on this topic can be found at here.
