Malicious major website ads lead to ransomware

June 6, 2014 – 9:25 PM

Malicious advertisements on domains belonging to Disney, Facebook, The Guardian newspaper and others are leading people to malware that encrypts a computer’s files until a ransom is paid, Cisco Systems has found.

The finding comes shortly after technology companies and U.S. law enforcement banded together in a large operation to shut down a botnet that distributed online banking malware and so-called “ransomware,” a highly profitable scam that has surged over the last year.

Cisco’s investigation unraveled a technically complex and highly effective way for infecting large number of computers with ransomware, which it described in detail on its blog.

“It really is insidious,” said Levi Gundert, a former Secret Service agent and now a technical lead for threat research and analysis at Cisco, in a phone interview Friday.

Cisco has a product called Cloud Web Security (CWS) which monitors its customers web surfing and reports if they are browsing to suspected malicious domains. CWS monitors billions of web page requests a day, Gundert said.

The company noticed that it was blocking requests to 90 domains, many of those WordPress sites, for more than 17 percent of its CWS customers, he said.

Source:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9248886/Malicious_major_website_ads_lead_to_ransomware

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