Ad Fraud Malware Updating Flash on Infected PCs
Ad fraud malware is one of the more profitable specialties in the cybercrime world, and the attackers who use it often have to adapt their tactics in order to keep the money rolling in. One of the tactics that they have adopted in recent months is that of updating the version of Flash that’s installed on an infected machine. This technique is not something unique to ad fraud malware. Attackers have been known to patch the vulnerabilities they exploited to get on to a given machine as a way to keep other hackers out and some malware strains have been seen doing this, too. But the motivation for doing this likely is somewhat different for criminals using ad fraud malware. In their case, they’re not so much interested in the cleanliness of the machine as they are in the ads a user sees being displayed correctly. That’s where the move to update Flash comes in. Flash is required to play many video ads in browsers, and most modern browsers won’t run Flash content if the version that’s in
