Right, so Google has cut an Israeli advertising company off after researchers caught its operation helping deliver spyware through online adverts. Discover-Tech had found a way to make those irritating little interruptions considerably nastier. You didn’t have to click. You didn’t have to download anything. Loading the advert could be enough for a selected device to come under attack.
All those years of telling people to be careful what they click, and these enterprising little swines had decided to dispense with the whole clicking bit.
The company presented itself as an ordinary advertising business. Find the audience, deliver the advert, collect the money. Except Citizen Lab’s investigation linked its advertising infrastructure to spyware attacks on devices at Al Jazeera. The newsroom had noticed unusual activity and helped researchers investigate. Someone trying to watch journalists had attracted some rather unwelcome attention themselves.
Google subsequently terminated Discover-Tech’s access to its advertising exchanges. An operation that depended on reaching people had lost an important means of getting to them.
But how had it acquired that access to begin with? Discover-Tech had appeared on Google’s approved and certified vendor lists. It had the reassuring credentials. It was inside the advertising business, where a website owner could accept its involvement without knowing what might follow when an advert loaded.
And for the person using the device, there might be nothing obviously wrong to notice.
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