AOL Ads Network Hit with Malvertising, over 1.5bn visitors at risk

Last week numbers of high profiled sites along with some western media sites were displaying malicious advertisement which infects the users users computers with the ransomeware malware. This was because AOL Platform ads network which servers ads was hijacked with the malware.

A security firm Cryphort Labs have discovered the list of the sites that were affected with this ransomeware malware advertising which includes Huffington Post, Yahoo News, AOL, TMZ, FHM, GameZone, Match.com, 123greetings.com, Weather.com and Gaia Online unwittingly.

AOL ads network serving malicious advertisements (Malvertising) for last six days which silently infecting the users computers with the Neutrino Exploit Kit. The worst thing is that users didn't need to click on the ads to be infected.

The ransomeware which was identified as "Kovter" was displaying the fake fake message from either US, UK, French, German and Turkish national police bodies such as the FBI and la Police Nationale, depending on the user's geographic location.

After the users gets infected with the malware, victims get the message informed that their computer had been locked down "due to suspicion of illegal content downloading and distribution" and that "suspicious files" had been transferred to a special server as evidence. In order to unlock their computer and avoid prosecution, the malware demand users to pay ransome.

Till yet it is not cleared how many users were infected, but researchers says that users who are using old version browser like Internet Explorer 8 or 9 are being affected. Users who were infected with the malware can solve the problem their problem by rebooting their system into Safe Mode and then scan with any good anti-malware tool.