One of my co-workers who works on Malwarebytes’ web research team just witnessed a real life example of how useful his work is in protecting people against scammers.

Stefan decided to visit Amsterdam with his girlfriend, and found a very nice and luxurious apartment in Amsterdam on Airbnb. In the description the owner asked interested parties to contact them by email.

“The property is listed on several websites so contact me directly by mail to check for availability.”

So Stefan emailed the owner. They replied, asking Stefan to book the property through Tripadvisor because, they said, the Airbnb platform was having some problems and the fees were higher than on Tripadvisor.

“My name is Carla Taddei, I am a co-host of this property, your dates are available.

The nightly rate is €250, also a €500 security deposit is required which will be fully refunded at the check out date (in case of no damages to the property). Cleaning and disinfection are included in the price. FREE CANCELLATION, FULL REFUND WITHIN 48 HOURS PRIOR THE CHECK IN.

Currently , we are encountering technical difficulties with the Airbnb calendar system, so we decided to use tripadvisor.com as our main platform. Because the Airbnb platform has very high fees, I choose to use only tripadvisor.com

If you would like to book our property, I need to know first some information about you, your name, your country and how many persons will stay with you in our property, also I want you to confirm me your email address. I will then make all the arrangements and I will send a tripadvisor invitation through tripadvisor.com in order to complete the reservation.”

Included in the mail were two shortened URLs which the owner claimed linked directly to the same property.

However, the link didn’t point to the real Tripadvisor site, but instead a fake one, which became clear when Malwarebytes Browser Guard popped up a warning advising Stefan not to continue.

Stefan received a mail that claimed to be from Tripadvisor, but more alarm bells were triggered when the sender email showed up as support@mailerfx.com — not exactly the email address you’d expect from Tripadvisor itself.

The owner sent a follow up email, saying the booking request had been sent out and insisting that Stefan had to pay and send confirmation before the booking could be validated.

“Everything was arranged from my side and you should have the booking request by now. My device routed it to my promotion folders so just check all your email folders because you must have it.

Please note, the full payment including the security deposit is required on the same time. The deposit is required for the security of the property, if there are any damages or something else is missing from the property and it is fully refundable on the day when you leave the property.

Please forward and the payment confirmation once done so I can validate your booking.”

The scammer hoped Stefan would click on the booking button on the fake Tripadvisor site. If he had done, he would have seen a prompt to register with ‘Tripadvisor’.

One step further and he’d have been asked to enter his credit card details, at which point he would have been likely to pay a lot more than the agreed €2000 for an apartment he would never see from the inside.

Further research based on the URL to the fake Tripadvisor website showed us that these scammers have probably been active for quite some time.

We found 220 websites related to this particular scam campaign. 26 of them were structured similar to tripadvisor-pre-approved-cdc0-4188-b6e5-0e742976f964.nerioni.cfd, and related sites. And 194 were structured similar to airbnb-pre-approved-0e03cd9c-7f5e.mucolg.buzz, and related sites.

How to recognize and avoid scams

There are several ways in which this procedure should have set your scam spidey senses in action, even if you’re not a professional like Stefan.

• When it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not true. Don’t fall for a ‘good deal’ that turns out to be just the opposite.
• Book directly via the platform you are on. If someone tries to get you to do something that’s not typical behaviour for that service, then they may well be up to no good.
• Check the links in the emails are going to where you expect. Even though the links in the email say tripadvisor.com, in reality they pointed to tinyurl.com. The use of URL shorteners where there is no actual need to shorten a URL is often done to obfuscate the link.
• In the same vein, check the address in your browser’s address bar to check if it is going to where you would expect. The fake Tripadvisor site was hosted at https://tripadvisor-pre-approved-7f18-4bf6-8470-a6d44541e783.tynoli.cfd/d07f/luxury-apartment-for-rent-in-amsterdam/f47fde which has been taken offline now.
• Don’t get rushed into making decisions. Scammers are always trying to create a sense of urgency so you click before you can think.
• Double check the website again before entering personal details or financial information.
• Keep your software updated and use a web filter that will alert you to suspicious sites.

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We don’t just report on threats—we remove them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

On the internet, people need to worry about more than just opening suspicious email attachments or entering their sensitive information into harmful websites—they also need to worry about their Google searches.

That’s because last year, as revealed in our 2024 ThreatDown State of Malware report, cybercriminals flocked to a malware delivery method that doesn’t require they know a victim’s email address, login credentials, personal information, or, anything, really.

Instead, cybercriminals just need to fool someone into clicking on a search result that looks remarkably legitimate.

This is the work of “malicious advertising,” or “malvertising,” for short. Malvertising is not malware itself. Instead, it’s a sneaky process of placing malware, viruses, or other cyber infections on a person’s computer, tablet, or smart phone. The malware that eventually slips onto a person’s device comes in many varieties, but cybercriminals tend to favor malware that can steal a person’s login credentials and information. With this newly stolen information, cybercriminals can then pry into sensitive online accounts that belong to the victim.

But before any of that digital theft can occur, cybercriminals must first ensnare a victim, and they do this by abusing the digital ad infrastructure underpinning Google search results.

Think about searching on Google for “running shoes”—you’ll likely see ads for Nike and Adidas. A Google search for “best carry-on luggage” will invariably produce ads for the consumer brands Monos and Away. And a Google search for a brand like Amazon will show, as expected, ads for Amazon.

But cybercriminals know this, and in response, they’ve created ads that look legitimate, but instead direct victims to malicious websites that carry malware. The websites themselves, too, bear a striking resemblance to whatever product or brand they’re imitating, so as to maintain a charade of legitimacy. From these websites, users download what they think is a valid piece of software, instead downloading malware that leaves them open to further attacks.

It’s true that malvertising is often understood as a risk to businesses, but the copycat websites that are created by cybercriminals can and often do impersonate popular brands for everyday users, too.

As revealed in our 2024 ThreatDown State of Malware report, the five most impersonated brands for malvertising last year included:

1. Amazon
2. Rufus
3. Weebly
4. NotePad++
5. TradingView

These five brands may not all carry the same familiarity, but their products and services capture a broad swath of user interest, from Weebly’s website creation products, to TradingView’s investment trading platform, to Rufus’s niche-but-useful portable OS booting tool.

Why the increase in malvertising last year?

If Google ads have been around for more than a decade, why are they only being abused by cybercriminals now? The truth is, malvertising has been around for years, but a particular resurgence was recorded more recently.

In 2022, cybercriminals lost access to one of their favorite methods of delivering malware.

That summer, Microsoft announced that it would finally block “macros” that were embedded into files that were downloaded from the internet. Macros are essentially instructions that users can program so that multiple tasks can be bundled together. The danger, though, is that cybercriminals would pre-program macros within certain files for Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and then send those files as malicious email attachments. Once those attachments were downloaded and opened by users, the embedded macros would trigger a set of instructions directing a person’s computer to install malware from a dangerous website online.

Macros were a scourge for cybersecurity for years, as they were effective and easy to deliver.

But when Microsoft restricted macro capabilities in 2022, cybercriminals needed to find another malware delivery channel. They focused on malvertising.

Today’s malvertising is increasingly sophisticated, as cybercriminals can create and purchase online ads that target specific types of users based on location and demographics. Concerningly, modern malvertising can even avoid basic fraud detection as cybercriminals can create websites that determine whether a user is a real person or simply a bot that is trawling the web to find and flag malicious activity.

How to protect against malvertising

The threat of malvertising is multi-layered: There are the fraudulent ads that cybercriminals place on Google search results, the malicious websites that imitate legitimate brands and companies to convince users to download malware, and the malware infection itself.

As such, any successful defense strategy must be multi-layered.

For safe browsing, people can rely on Malwarebytes Browser Guard, a browser extension that blocks third-party tracking and flags malicious websites known to be in the control of cybercriminals. As we wrote before:

“Malwarebytes Browser Guard provides additional protection to standard ad-blocking features by covering a larger area of the attack chain all the way to domains controlled by attackers. Thanks to its built-in heuristic engine it can also proactively block never-before-seen malicious websites.”

The problem with malvertising, though, is that new malicious websites are created every single day. Cybersecurity defenders, then, are often caught in a game of catch-up.

Here, users can find safety from Malwarebytes Premium, which provides real-time protection to detect and stop any cyberthreats that get installed onto a device, even if those threats are masquerading as legitimate apps or software.

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We don’t just report on threats—we remove them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.