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Hackers are setting up fake websites for popular free and open-source software to promote malicious downloads through advertisements in Google search results.
Notepad++, 7-ZIP and WinRAR, and the widely used media player VLC as well as CCleaner utility to name a few
Germán Fernández of cybersecurity company CronUp provides a list of 70 domains that are distributing malware through Google Ads search results by impersonating legitimate software
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CronUp/Malware-IOCs/main/2023-01-17_Arechclient2_GoogleAds
Hackers push malware via Google search ads for VLC, 7-Zip, CCleaner
Follow
it's massive
"One example we found is a Google Ad search result for Rufus, a free utility for creating bootable USB flash drives"
tweets:
amount of people falling for these ads
https://twitter.com/malwrhunterteam/status/1615129063257001984
https://mobile.twitter.com/mdmck10/status/1615010474088611842
brave browser
https://twitter.com/crep1x/status/1615840062729605122
Google has to make money
https://twitter.com/wdormann/status/1614675821578395655