This is the advertising scam that affected 11 million mobile phones

When browsing the Internet, entering web pages or even reading emails, we can be the target of scams, ads that are deceptive or malware files that infect our PCs and mobile phones. Although we have been able to see a large number of scams through phishing and fraud, many users already know how to identify when an email is false. But now a advertising scam more complex call vastfluxWhat have you achieved affect 11 million mobiles and hundreds of companies.

Browsing the Internet is safe as long as we know that the websites we go to are reliable, we do not click on links that may be unreliable and above all we do not download executable files of unknown origin. Basically, by meeting those standards and having a good anti virus, most PC users can avoid malware and hacker attacks. But with mobile phones, the situation is quite different, beginning because the majority of users they don’t have antivirus Or the one they have is the typical one install by default the company. Its effectiveness when it comes to protecting us is at least questionable and if we add to this that the deception was not visible to the naked eyewe can already get an idea of ​​the high numbers of people affected.

Vastflux scams users with invisible mobile ads

A deceptive advertising attack has been revealed that has turned out to be the biggest scam that has occurred, affecting millions of mobile phones. With the name of vastfluxwe have a new ad campaEsports Extrasthatand hid the ads so that users do not notice. As reported by Human Security, Vastflux was discovered last year by them last year and immediately caught their attention. As it turns out, this scam worked by targeting a advertising spacewhich he obtained after winning an advertiser auction.

At this time, it inserted a malicious code that allowed them to stack multiple video ads on top of each other. By the time users logged in they would only see a single video with ads, but in reality, there were up to 25 promotional videos stacked. While the user was unaware, with Vastflux they were earning revenue from each ad and also used multiple domains to carry out such scams.

In total there are 11 million mobile phones affected by the scam

With this technique where users did not realize that they were being scammed with advertising on their mobiles, Vastflux was able to reach a large number of them. We talked about the fact that, to this day, it is believed that there was 11 million devices affected. This scam was mainly targeting users with iOSalthough it also affected some terminals Android. What also surprises us is the fact that in his prime, in June 2022, he managed to make 12 billion ad requests per day.

At first glance, the affected users did not know anything about this, but an indication to find out that we were being affected was to see the battery. With so many ads loading at once, battery consumption increases. What to say, it is strange that users had not reported a high consumption when browsing. Now, during the time that the mobile advertising scam lasted, it was released several mitigations to combat it. Finally, the group responsible for the scam took its servers offline in December and nothing has been heard from them since.