Malvertising is nothing more than another technique to try to infect our computers.
The name of this practice comes from the words " malicious advertising " and what it does is hide malware to infect our devices in the advertising spaces of other websites. Now we will see how it works.
But to fully understand what malvertising is, we must know what adware is, which is its older brother.
Adware and malvertising
Let's start from the beginning, what is adware? Adware is any program that automatically displays advertising to the user during installation and/or use, thereby generating profits for its creators.
They are usually installed without the user knowing it, since, although it is not recommended, on more than one occasion we opt for the "NEXT-NEXT-NEXT" installation. That is, many times while we are installing a program it warns us that with the installation other programs, toolbars... programs that we do not need and that are going to be annoying will be included, but by not reading carefully what we are accepting, we do not realize it.
These types of programs do not usually cause direct harm to the user, but they are highly invasive and annoying.
An example of adware is when unsolicited advertising windows start appearing on our screen, making it quite difficult for us to continue using our device as usual.
As users have become more aware of this type of installation, attackers have had to reinvent themselves to remain effective, and that is where malvertising comes from.
Malvertising, unlike adware, is a practice that involves malicious programs, not just something annoying. In addition, the fundamental difference with adware is that the user does not need to install it to become infected; all that is needed is to have " plugins " (add-ons) for our usual browser or any other type of outdated software on our computer.
What the attacker will do is look for security flaws in the browser plugins and software installed on the computer and, if found, install malicious software without the user being aware.
In other words, malvertising takes advantage of the information it obtains from being an advertiser about our programs and looks for "back doors" in them to try to sneak into our devices. If it doesn't find them, nothing would happen.
And just because of that we can get infected? Yes, if we don't take the proper precautions.
How to protect ourselves?
Now tha sing is and how it works, we must greece phone number data learn to protect ourselves. To do so, we must follow these simple tips:
1. Keep our systems always updated.
If we keep all our devices up to date , from operating system updates to browsers, including the programs or applications we use, we will always be better protected.
2. Install and enable only the browser add-ons necessary for daily use.
In fact, a good practice is to disable them when we don't need them.
3. Read the permissions requested by the add-ons or plugins before installing them.
