New Delhi: The threat actors behind the black hat redirect malware campaign have scaled up their campaign to use more than 70 bogus domains mimicking URL shorteners and infect over 10,800 websites. The campaign is said to have been active since September last year and is orchestrated to redirect visitors to compromised WordPress sites to fake Q&A portals. The goal is to increase the authority of spammy sites in search engine results.
“The main objective is still ad fraud by artificially increasing traffic to pages which contain the AdSense ID which contain Google ads for revenue generation,” Sucuri researcher Ben Martin said in a report published last week.
The details of the malicious activity were first exposed by the GoDaddy-owned company in November 2022.
What makes the latest campaign significant is the use of Bing search result links and Twitter’s link shortener (t[.]co) service, along with Google, in their redirects, indicating an expansion of the threat actor’s footprint.
“It’s possible that these bad actors are simply trying to convince Google that real people from different IPs using different browsers are clicking on their search results,” Sucuri noted at the time. “This technique artificially sends Google signals that those pages are performing well in search.”
Though it is not known precisely how the WordPress sites become infected in the first place, but once the website is breached, the threat actor injects backdoor PHP code that allows for persistent remote access as well as redirect site visitors.
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