How to protect yourself and your family from scam ads

The internet hosts countless types of malware. The most common one right now is called "malvertising," and it's truly everywhere.

The internet hosts countless types of malware. The most common one right now is called "malvertising," and it's truly everywhere. The thing helping this trend along is, unsurprisingly, AI — attackers can use it to generate plenty of very convincing pages. Avoiding this kind of malware isn't hard at all; you just need to be informed and pay attention. So in today's article we'll look at how to spot malvertising.

So what is malvertising?

It's a form of misleading advertising that tries to extract information or money from you. These are ads for sites pretending to be legitimate retailers, robbing people in the process. The pages are designed to look identical to the real ones and redirect you to their payment gateway, or steal your login credentials. Google is currently testing a feature that could limit these attacks by showing a verification badge next to verified sites. Unfortunately that feature isn't public yet.

So how do I protect myself?

As I said, it's not difficult. The main thing is to check the URL — or, even better, type the URL straight into the browser yourself. You can also use DNS filters, which will block most (though not all) of these ads automatically. From my perspective they're especially useful for grandparents and people who aren't very tech-savvy, which neatly brings me to my next point.

Educate the people around you!

This point is probably the most important. Do you have parents, grandparents, kids, or other relatives who don't know about this kind of scam? The answer is 99% likely yes — and if they use the internet, they should know about it. Take a moment and show them what to watch out for. The ideal would be to find one of these scam sites and walk them through it, but even just an explanation can go a long way.