It brings a whole new meaning to the term ‘Booby Trap.’ Hackers from a group known as KovCoreG were able to infect ads that were displayed on PornHub, putting millions of visitors at risk. As one of the world’s largest pornography websites, the viruses have the potential to impact many people, though experts say that the site itself isn’t to blame. Instead, the ad network ‘Traffic Junky’ is where the viruses came from.
There were many different variations of the infected ads, which would require users to click on them in order to get the virus. In one example, the pop-up ad would mimic the notification users would get saying that they need to upgrade their flash version in order to view a particular video. Since this is a common thing that people need to do on their computers, they are much more likely to actually click on the infected ad.
According to experts, the infected ads have now been removed. Porn focused sites have long been a source for viruses, likely due to the unscrupulous nature of the industry. There has been a significant amount of effort in the past couple years to push back, but as this ‘outbreak’ shows, there are still weak points that need to be dealt with.
The CEO from Malwarebytes, Marcin Kleczynski, commented that, “What we’ve noticed – and it may come as a surprise – is top adult domains [websites] are actually putting in a lot of resources toward fighting malware.”
While this is a good thing, there are millions of smaller sites like this which also need to do a lot of catching up, especially since many people who browse these types of sites will visit many pages in their endless effort to find what they are looking for.
