A malvertising campaign on Facebook uses a endearing story has went viral on social media, tempting users to push the content for doing malicious activity. The victims are then immediately redirected to a fake tech support page for stealing the sensitive information.
The scam content is been captioned as “A man who jumped out of his car at a traffic light to have his puppy meet another dog”.
The animal lovers, once click on the link are then trapped and then redirected to a malicious page known as a browser locker. Afterwards, the page displays fake messages about the computer viruses and convinces users to call for assistance.
Consequently, these fake schemes uses a simple technique known as cloaking. It’s aim is to only display the malicious page while showing authentic content the rest of the time. By these scams, the threat actors locates the IP address, Geolocation, ISPs, etc of the victim.
Basically, cloaking refers to the practice of presenting various content or URLs to the users and search engines. It has been considered as a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it gives users with various other results than they expected.
Cloaking takes the victim user to the other sites than he or she expects by misleading those site’s true content. In cloaking, the search engine and the users are not exactly on the same page. Both the user and the search engine hence are being deceived. Also, cloaking is been considered as a black hat technique that, while used, is disapproved by most of the SEO firms and Web publishers and if caught using it will result into huge penalties for the users.
