Malware Alert: Downloading Grammarly, Slack, Teamviewer, Audacity After Google Search Can Infect Your Computers

NEW DELHI: Hackers are using Google Ads more and more to target people who are looking for popular software products.

According to reports, Grammarly, Slack, Dashlane, Audacity, ITorrent, AnyDesk, Libre Office, Teamviewer, Thunderbird, and more are among the software programmes that are being faked.

Threat actors copy the official websites of the above projects and spread trojanized versions of the software when users click the download button.

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Advertisers can use the Google Ads platform to promote pages on Google Search.

People who use a browser without an ad blocker to look for original software are likely to click on malicious links “because it looks so much like the actual search result.”

As soon as a targeted visitor goes to one of these ‘disguised’ sites, the server sends them to the rogue site and from there to the malicious payload.

If Google finds out that the landing page is bad, the campaign is stopped and the ads are taken down.

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The malware payload, which comes in ZIP or MSI format, is downloaded from trusted file-sharing and code-hosting services like GitHub, Dropbox, or Discord’s CDN.

This makes sure that the victim’s anti-virus software won’t object to the download.

Guardio Labs recently saw a campaign in which a threat actor used a hacked version of Grammarly to lure users. Malware was included with the software that was supposed to work.

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