Scammers are abusing Google Adwords, the search engine giant’s advertising platform, to spread malware to people looking for legitimate and popular software.
Google’s safety measures are usually robust, but experts found that they managed to employ a workaround.
The campaign is simple – the crooks would clone popular software such as Grammarly, MSI Afterburner, Slack, or others, and infect them with an infostealer. In this case, the attackers were adding Raccoon Stealer, and IceID malware loader. Then, they would create a landing page where the victims would be sent to download the malicious programs. These pages were designed to look seemingly identical to the legitimate ones.
