Clickfraud Malware Hijacked Searches on 900,000 Devices

  • 16 May 2016
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By Eduard Kovacs on May 16, 2016
 
A clickfraud botnet that has ensnared a large number of devices around the world hijacks search results to help cybercriminals make a profit through Google’s AdSense program.

According to Bitdefender, the malware powering the botnet, dubbed Redirector.Paco, has been around since September 2014 and until now it has infected more than 900,000 devices. A majority of the victims are located in India, but infections have also been spotted in the United States, Malaysia, Greece, Italy, Brazil and several African countries.

Once it infects a device, the Trojan makes some modifications to the system so that results from popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are replaced with the results of a custom Google search, ensuring that the attackers make a profit from the ads that are displayed.
 
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I think that this type of malware is rather more insidious than ransomware, given that one may well not know that one is infected for a while at least...the ingenuity of the miscreants never ceases to amaze me. 

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