Malvertising set to wreak one BEELLION dollars in damage this year

Records have fallen as malvertising clocked its most prolific month in history, making it one of the biggest threats to endpoint security. If the scourge continues, criminals will have inflicted a billion dollars in damages by the end of the year from a paltry US$12,000 investment, according to researchers at security firm …

[Detective Emil]

Serve yourself

Invincea's report contains no justification for the unstated $250 average cost to victims of each and every impression that underlies its scary headline figure of over half a billion dollars of damage. For example, as this refers specifically to Cryptowall, mobile device users (in the majority in Blighty, according to a recent report) and Mac users (even those with Flash installed and, I know, a minority) are immune: the report discusses only Windows. Even Windows users with up-to-date malware protection have a good chance of dodging the bullet: after all, the report reassuringly describes how Invincea's software nullified the threat; it's just conceivable that its competitors could do the same.

[Richard Wharram]

ABP then?

To be honest I hadn't bothered with ABP for a few years but I've put it on everything now.

It has the bonus of making The Daily Mash site actually readable rather than flicking around all over the place as the ads load. Also the ubiquitous Clickbait links are gone. Why did I ever stop using it?

[Ken Hagan]

That JIT trick

How does that work then? At some point, you have to assemble the finished product and at that point the AV software either recognises it or doesn't. If you'd downloaded it as a single entity then the same applies, either the AV software recognises it or it doesn't. Also, the PC is owned at the point where the bad guys have a command shell, so the rest of the diagram is just fluffery.

This sounds to me like an attempt to persuade the naive that there is a new kind of threat out there that requires the spending of fresh protection money.

[Alan Brown]

And advertisers wonder....

...why use of adblockers is up by 45% and localhost nullrouting of known problem sites is widespread.

(ABP and friends don't update hosts files. Other tools such as ad-away do)