Chinese authorities have recently launched an offensive against operators of a massive campaign of advertising programs fireball Malware that has infected about 250 million computers, including Windows and Mac OS, the world earlier this year.
The adware campaign was discovered by security researchers at Check Point last month after it has infected more than 25 million computers in India, 24 million in Brazil, 16 million in Mexico, 13 million in Indonesia, and 5, 5 million from the United States.
Nicknamed the fireball malware, the infamous adware is integrated with other legitimate free software downloaded from the Internet.
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Once installed, the malware installs the browser plug-in to manipulate the victim’s browser settings and replaces the default search engines and pages in the fake search engines.
Far from legitimate purposes, the fireball malware has the ability to analyze the victim’s web traffic, execute malicious code on infected computers, install plugins and even run malfunctions effectively, creating a huge security hole in systems and Specific networks.
At that time, the researchers at Check Point have linked to the operation Rafotech, a Chinese company Beijing intend to offer digital marketing applications and games to 300 million customers, accusing the company of using the fireball malware to generate income
Through the injection of ads in the web browser.
Now, the municipal committee of Security Bodies Beijing Public Security Bureau Network has made 11 arrests in the case.
All the suspects are Rafotech employees, three of whom have served as chairman of the company, technical director, and operations director reports the new Chinese agency.
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Chinese outlets have reported that the developers of the fireball malware have made a profit of 80 million yuan (nearly 12 million) year advertising programs.
The creation of Rafotech was jointly funded by several people in 2015 and by the end of the year developed the fireball malware for fraudulent advertising, which redirects any request from a victim to Yahoo.com or Google.com and includes pixels Follow up Collect the information from the victim.
All suspects arrested allegedly admitted to the development and distribution of malicious fireball malware software. The arrests began in June, shortly after the story of the fireball malware has gone online.
Undoubtedly, the company was using fireball malware to increase its advertising and revenue, but at the same time, adware has the ability to distribute additional malware, which could arise in the future as a potential disaster.
