How do criminals use advertising for their malicious purposes?
                     How do criminals use advertising for their 
malicious purposes?
John Z
Writes on ad managing using ad servers for 
publisher s, involved with Adspeed ad server 
for publishers.
There are countless advertisers out there who understand how easy it 
can be to reach a wide audience using online ads. It has become one of 
the most cost-effective ways to get your message out to the masses. 
Unfortunately, for that very same reason, there are also criminals who 
try to take advantage of loopholes and weaknesses in the complex 
advertising ecosystem in order to make money and potentially create as 
much damage as possible. The sad reality is that not every ad you see 
online is a legitimate one, and it’s not always the fault of the publisher 
that these ads get out there but it damages the reputation of legitimate 
publishers, advertisers and ad servers. Let’s take a look at some ways in 
which criminals use ads to their benefit.
Malicious ads
One of the most common ways in which criminals use ads is to spread 
viruses, spyware and malware. Thus, the term malvertising was coined. 
The virus is embedded deep within the ad code and the chain of 
requests, making it difficult to detect. This is just one of the reasons why 
it is so important that everyone should have an antivirus software of 
some kind installed on their computer. The criminals always try to stay 
one step ahead, though, so it’s also important that your software is 
updated regularly so that malicious ads do not damage your system.
Pretending to be a valid advertiser
To get their malicious code into the system, the criminals often create 
fake companies and websites in order to pose as valid advertisers. Their 
ads might look like any other regular ads. However, when certain 
conditions are met, the malicious code payload is delivered instead of a 
valid ad. For some fraudulent ads, you might click on the ad link, land on 
a professional looking website, and pay your money for a fake product 
that you will never see. Worse yet, you may also have handed over your 
credit card or banking information to the criminals.
Fake traffic
In order to make money from ads, there needs to be people viewing and 
clicking on those ads. You may be surprised to learn that the internet is 
home to countless websites that are designed to do nothing more than 
pull in ad revenue. How, though, do these sites get found? The answer is 
quite simple, and it is that unscrupulous entities will buy traffic that 
directs unsuspecting surfers to those pages just for the purpose of 
seeing ads.
Ad stuffing
We have all landed on websites that we were drawn into by a clickbait 
style headline. Once there, you need to go through pages and pages of a 
story to get to the actual page that you wanted to see in the first place. 
Every page that you go through is stuffed full of ads, which may include 
invisible ones that run in the background. Even if you give up after a 
couple of pages, the criminals have generated a good number of 
fraudulent ad views.
Controlling and selling access to infected devices
When an infected ad delivers a virus, it might not cause any immediate 
damage but the virus is inside and activated. It monitors and takes 
control of your system in the background. When combining with other 
devices, it creates a botnet of many infected devices. Sometimes, the 
people who created that code will use that access for themselves, but 
oftentimes, they will act as a middleman and sell your infected device to 
a third party. Again, these are professional criminals running organized 
crimes so you need to be careful and protect your devices against these 
attacks at all times.
About Adspeed
AdSpeed ad server is a reliable & powerful ad serving and ad 
management solution that serves your ads, tracks impressions & clicks 
and reports ad statistics in real-time. Driven by the latest ad serving 
technologies, the goal of Adspeed adserver is to provide a reliable 
platform that can help in executing online advertising strategy more 
efficiently. 
Thank you for spending your precious time in reading this article.