Cybersecurity technicians from Malwarebytes.com have researched a malvertising operation that had already been active for about a year with the peak on March, 2017. The malicious ads have gathered about half a billion clicks in just three months.
Malvertising is a cybercrime tool that works by breaking into ad networks and planting infected ads among others. Such adds carry viruses, trojans, ransomware and other types of malware. Notably, such ads needn’t to be clicked at — they can do their black work just after being loaded by a browser.
The campaign described by Malwarebytes.com has been called RoughTed. Its ads have the ability to bypass adblockers (including Adblock Plus and uBlock origin). AdGuard users don’t need to worry — we have long ago updated our filter lists.
blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2017/05/roughted-the-anti-ad-blocker-malvertiser/