{"id":19698,"date":"2017-10-10T12:38:09","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T16:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/?p=19698"},"modified":"2019-11-15T06:44:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-15T11:44:38","slug":"pornhub-malvertising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/19698\/","title":{"rendered":"Malware spread through PornHub"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you read the title of this article, you know we\u2019re going to discuss an issue that may make some readers blush \u2026 yes, malware.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier today, a colleague passed along an article noting that popular online pornography site PornHub was serving ads with baked-in malware that infected users\u2019 computers by pretending to be important browser updates. The attack, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.proofpoint.com\/us\/threat-insight\/post\/kovter-group-malvertising-campaign-exposes-millions-potential-ad-fraud-malware\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">reported by Proofpoint<\/a>, was the work of the KovCoreG group.<\/p>\n<p>You might reflexively say, <em>This can\u2019t harm me!<\/em> or <em>Who watches porn on the Internet?<\/em> but PornHub is a very popular site, and that makes the threat relevant to more people than you might expect. According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alexa.com\/siteinfo\/pornhub.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Alexa<\/a>, the site is currently ranked the twentieth most popular site in the US, and thirty-seventh in the world. Last year, a reported <a href=\"http:\/\/observer.com\/2017\/01\/pornhub-stats-data-2016\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">92 billion videos<\/a> (link is safe for work) were watched on its site.<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, this could potentially be pretty big.<\/p>\n<p><b>What can you do to protect yourself from attacks like this?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Just don\u2019t click.<\/b> We\u2019ve said this many times, but it bears repeating: If you are on a site that you would not want your grandmother (or grandchildren) knowing you are on, think twice \u2014 and then think twice more \u2014 about clicking any ads or downloading anything from there.<\/li>\n<li><b>If you must click, double-check every link.<\/b> In this particular case, the fake updates were coming from sites that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.proofpoint.com\/sites\/default\/files\/kovterf4.png\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">obviously had no association<\/a> with browser developers.<\/li>\n<li><b>Run antivirus.<\/b> Good cybersecurity solutions have multilayered protection that helps users avoid cyberthreats at several points of any cyberattack.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<input type=\"hidden\" class=\"category_for_banner\" value=\"kis-porno-try\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most popular porn sites in the world was serving malware through ads to millions of its users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":636,"featured_media":19699,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2683],"tags":[2694,2695,815,36,1566,2693,422],"class_list":{"0":"post-19698","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-threats","9":"tag-kovcoreg","10":"tag-kovter","11":"tag-malvertising","12":"tag-malware-2","13":"tag-porn","14":"tag-pornhub","15":"tag-threats"},"hreflang":[{"hreflang":"x-default","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/19698\/"},{"hreflang":"en-in","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.in\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/11532\/"},{"hreflang":"en-us","url":"https:\/\/usa.kaspersky.com\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/12981\/"},{"hreflang":"en-gb","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.uk\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/11872\/"},{"hreflang":"es-mx","url":"https:\/\/latam.kaspersky.com\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/11570\/"},{"hreflang":"es","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.es\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/14559\/"},{"hreflang":"it","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.it\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/14307\/"},{"hreflang":"ru","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.ru\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/18988\/"},{"hreflang":"tr","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.tr\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/4255\/"},{"hreflang":"fr","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.fr\/blog\/malware-publicite-pornhub\/9632\/"},{"hreflang":"pt-br","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.br\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/9826\/"},{"hreflang":"pl","url":"https:\/\/plblog.kaspersky.com\/pornhub-malvertising\/8309\/"},{"hreflang":"de","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.de\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/14937\/"},{"hreflang":"ja","url":"https:\/\/blog.kaspersky.co.jp\/pornhub-malvertising\/18406\/"},{"hreflang":"ru-kz","url":"https:\/\/blog.kaspersky.kz\/pornhub-malvertising\/16891\/"},{"hreflang":"en-au","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/18885\/"},{"hreflang":"en-za","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.za\/blog\/pornhub-malvertising\/18876\/"}],"acf":[],"banners":"","maintag":{"url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/tag\/porn\/","name":"porn"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/636"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19698"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29902,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19698\/revisions\/29902"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}