This week typically marks the peak of yearly ad scam activity, as online shopping activity surges in timing with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As expected, frequent threat actor eGobbler, named for a scam detected on Thanksgiving way back in 2017, is back with another holiday-adjacent attack, this time targeting users across Europe.
Known for ads featuring heavily edited images of celebrities, eGobbler's latest attack used images of Richard Branson and other famous figures to drive users to fake websites that mimicked major news publishers like the BBC. The attack featured many of eGobbler’s signature techniques, which the Confiant Security Team has been tracking for years, and was heavily cloaked to evade detection.
Our team first detected the increased activity around 4:00 AM ET/ 9:00 AM CEST and quickly identified and blocked the malicious domains. The attack was fully contained by 7:39AM ET, with more than 3.2 million impressions across Europe, including in Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, blocked in just under 4 hours.
We’re grateful to all the people who worked with us to take down this threat, and to all the security teams who will be working overtime this holiday season to keep our online activity safe!