Sneaky Crypto Malware Miners Are Targeting Ad Networks Next

[david13D]

Websites and publishers need to be prepared for cryptocurrency miners slipping into ads on their sites, according to Israeli adtech firm Spotad.

The company, which operates an AI-powered advertising platform for purchasing media space, recently discovered cryptocurrency mining activity on its network, a development the company claims is becoming part of wider trend.

Spotad’s AI system, named "Sarah," recently identified anomalies in the code of seemingly legitimate ads for both desktop and mobile that turned out to be a miner for the cryptocurrency monero. The JavaScript-enabled ad was designed to dupe users into clicking on a pop-up that would initiate the mining process.

According to co-founder Yoav Oz, the agency responsible for the ad was unaware of the code that was embedded inside. The name of the agency or the subject of the ad has not been disclosed.

[GreenBits]

Websites and publishers need to be prepared for cryptocurrency miners slipping into ads on their sites, according to Israeli adtech firm Spotad.

The company, which operates an AI-powered advertising platform for purchasing media space, recently discovered cryptocurrency mining activity on its network, a development the company claims is becoming part of wider trend.

Spotad’s AI system, named "Sarah," recently identified anomalies in the code of seemingly legitimate ads for both desktop and mobile that turned out to be a miner for the cryptocurrency monero. The JavaScript-enabled ad was designed to dupe users into clicking on a pop-up that would initiate the mining process.

According to co-founder Yoav Oz, the agency responsible for the ad was unaware of the code that was embedded inside. The name of the agency or the subject of the ad has not been disclosed.

Given the current network difficulty, it would take a wide spread of this malware to amalgamate into a decent amount of hashing power. And now that ad platforms are aware of the presence of malicious code like this, it will be much harder to slip something like this by unnoticed.

but this will be the future. once cryptos become a bit more widely adopted/ubiquitous in everyday life, most things with spare processing power will be mining. It would be a waste of resources not to do so. And in certain cases, the byproduct of mining (heat) is actually useful!

21 (a company from back in the day) tried to pull this off. i think the difficulty got to big too fast; they abandoned this seemingly.

[player514]

Websites and publishers need to be prepared for cryptocurrency miners slipping into ads on their sites, according to Israeli adtech firm Spotad.

The company, which operates an AI-powered advertising platform for purchasing media space, recently discovered cryptocurrency mining activity on its network, a development the company claims is becoming part of wider trend.

Spotad’s AI system, named "Sarah," recently identified anomalies in the code of seemingly legitimate ads for both desktop and mobile that turned out to be a miner for the cryptocurrency monero. The JavaScript-enabled ad was designed to dupe users into clicking on a pop-up that would initiate the mining process.

According to co-founder Yoav Oz, the agency responsible for the ad was unaware of the code that was embedded inside. The name of the agency or the subject of the ad has not been disclosed.

This has definitely already begun. It'll only be pushed to wider scales now. Luckily, most modern web browsers are releasing blocking software on their stores. Take a look at this example from Mozilla Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/miningblocker/

Similarly, Chrome has a couple of mining blockers on their web store as well. I'm not too sure how they work (probably limit the CPU/GPU usage on the browser to a certain amount), but as far as I can tell from a couple of reviews, they're doing their jobs. I guess this will end up being a cat and mouse game between the hackers trying to bypass these new securities.

[Mike Mayor]

Websites and publishers need to be prepared for cryptocurrency miners slipping into ads on their sites, according to Israeli adtech firm Spotad.

The company, which operates an AI-powered advertising platform for purchasing media space, recently discovered cryptocurrency mining activity on its network, a development the company claims is becoming part of wider trend.

Spotad’s AI system, named "Sarah," recently identified anomalies in the code of seemingly legitimate ads for both desktop and mobile that turned out to be a miner for the cryptocurrency monero. The JavaScript-enabled ad was designed to dupe users into clicking on a pop-up that would initiate the mining process.

According to co-founder Yoav Oz, the agency responsible for the ad was unaware of the code that was embedded inside. The name of the agency or the subject of the ad has not been disclosed.

Given the current network difficulty, it would take a wide spread of this malware to amalgamate into a decent amount of hashing power. And now that ad platforms are aware of the presence of malicious code like this, it will be much harder to slip something like this by unnoticed.

but this will be the future. once cryptos become a bit more widely adopted/ubiquitous in everyday life, most things with spare processing power will be mining. It would be a waste of resources not to do so. And in certain cases, the byproduct of mining (heat) is actually useful!

21 (a company from back in the day) tried to pull this off. i think the difficulty got to big too fast; they abandoned this seemingly.

Yes exactly. They would need to be altcoin miners like mining monero or eth or something and that will still only be your country doing the work and for a short amount of time you would need to "infect" or run background software on so many peoples PC's when they visit the site that it will be unrealistic and a waste of time and it's only going to get worse. Earlier on it would have worked but not now.  Though it would have been an interesting way to use browser me mining instead of using ads.

[Jet Cash]

but this will be the future. once cryptos become a bit more widely adopted/ubiquitous in everyday life, most things with spare processing power will be mining. It would be a waste of resources not to do so. And in certain cases, the byproduct of mining (heat) is actually useful!

I'm surprised they haven't targetted cars. Most drivers have no idea of the converstions that cars have amongst themselves, and with various government agencies.