This fake Google Alert wants to trick you into thinking Flash is still a thing
Novel approach tricks Google Alerts into promoting unwanted apps
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Cybercriminals have reportedly managed to trick anotherGoogleservice into deliveringmalicious appsto unsuspecting users.
Their latest target is the Google Alerts service, which researchers have found has been abused to push fake updates of the now-discontinuedAdobe FlashPlayer.
The latest campaign adds to the growing list of Google services that have been repeatedlyabused in novel waysby threat actors for malicious purposes.
Fake alert
In this latest instance, unscrupulous elements first create fake stories with titles that contain popular keywords in order to get the attention of the search engine’s bots.
Once these fake stories have been indexed, the Google Alerts service will push them to the inbox of folks who’ve set up alerts to track those keywords.
Trusting them to be legitimate, since they are recommended by a Google service, when clicked the fake stories then redirect to a malicious site, which promotes all kinds of potentially unwanted programs (PUPs).
BleepingComputerrecently observed one such campaign that used the fake Google Alert story to instead push a notification that suggests users to install an app to purportedly update their out-of-date Flash player. Not surprisingly, the app then promotes various PUPs.
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This is just one of the recent examples of tricksters exploiting the trust of Google services for malicious purposes. In the past, threat actors have abused Google Forms and Google Sheets for malware command-and-control communications. Security researchers recently discovered a web skimming operation that leveraged the reputation of Google’s Apps Script domain.
Via:BleepingComputer
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
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