The FBI Recommends the Use of Ad Blockers

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is advising the use of ad blockers as they are concerned that attackers are increasingly imitating well-known brands in advertisements that search engines display in search results.

In addition, we wrote that The FBI found no evidence of Russia’s fight against extortionists, and also that The FBI Said That Scammers Use Deepfakes to Get a Job.

And also the media wrote that the FBI will transfer compromised passwords to Have I Been Pwned.

Apparently, law enforcement officers suddenly turned their attention to one of the varieties of malicious advertising. They write that scammers regularly register domains that are as similar as possible to the domains of legitimate companies and services, and then use them to buy advertising space in search engines. Since the ads appear at the top of the search results, a person may mistake them for one of the search results and click on the link.

As a rule, such advertising leads to pages that mimic real official websites of various companies and services. For example, if a user is looking for an application, after clicking on the link, he will be taken to a fake site that exploits the name of this program and contains a link ostensibly to download it. But in fact, the victim will be able to download only malware from such a resource.

The FBI notes that such malicious advertising in search results is often disguised as websites related to finance (in particular, cryptocurrency exchanges). On such resources, users are asked to enter a username and password, which will eventually end up in the hands of criminals and will be used to steal funds.