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Porn is not only bad for you, but also for your system

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DailyBite
DailyBiteOct 11, 2017 | 21:52

Porn is not only bad for you, but also for your system

Watching porn may be bad for you, but not for the many reasons that are already out there. According to a Guardian report, millions of PornHub (the world’s largest website for streaming pornographic content, with Alexa data indicating approximately 26 billion yearly visits) users have been targeted with a “malvertising” attack that tricked them into installing malware on their PCs and phones.

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According to information security firm Proofpoint, the “malvertisement” had been active “for more than a year, having already exposed millions of potential victims in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia to a malware known as Kovter, by pretending to be software updates to popular browsers”.

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Photo: Daily Mail

According to them, the hack was carried out by a group known as KovCoreG. Visitors to PornHub were redirected to a website that claimed to be offer software updates for web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. The moment users downloaded and opened the file it would install Kovter, a malware that would take over the system and use it to click on fake advertisements that would make money for several spam websites.

“While the payload in this case is ad fraud malware, it could just as easily have been ransomware, an information stealer, or any other malware. Regardless, threat actors are following the money and looking to more effective combinations of social engineering, targeting and pre-filtering to infect new victims at scale,” Proofpoint told Guardian.

Following notification from Proofpoint, PornHub and the Traffic Junky advertising network have been working to remove the infected content and keep visitors safe.

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Photo: Daily Mail

Corey Price, Pornhub vice president, told Mail Online: “PornHub’s commitment to providing their viewers with an optimal online experience has made security a top priority, allowing us to respond quickly to cybercrime and safeguard our customers. Over the course of the past year, we’ve taken several measures to further ensure the safety of our users.

We announced a bug bounty programme through HackerOne to reward researchers that find security bugs on our platform with bounties as high as $25,000. This programme has been extremely successful thus far, providing some of our savvy fans with a chance to earn some extra cash. More importantly, it ensures the safety of our 80 million daily visitors. Additionally, we went all-in on encryption and switched to HTTPS by default across the entirety of our site to help ensure our users’ privacy and offer heightened security against hackers and malware.”

Pornographic websites have for long, been a hotbed of malware attacks and are generally considered not safe for one’s computers. PornHub, however, has been for the longest time, a clean (no pun intended) website.

Mail Online adds that in September, researchers at Wandera, a London-based mobile phone consultancy, discovered that watching mobile porn on your smartphone puts you at much higher risk of having your data leaked than watching it on your PC. They examined several websites that were most likely to contain malware, and found that the adult apps were the most likely to have malicious bugs.

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Javvad Malik, security advocate at AlienVault says, “In 2016, Google removed 112 million bad ads which aside from malware, included illegal product promotion and misleading ads. The issue being that there are insufficient controls to place an advert with an ad network, making it far easier to get a malicious app accepted by an official app store. This has led to an upturn in the number of reputable organisations distributing malvertising.”

Last updated: October 11, 2017 | 22:00
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