Discover-Tech’s Controlium software lets clients mass-profile internet users then covertly hack targets, say researchers at University of Toronto

An Israeli advertising agency has been serving millions of online adverts that allow “zero-click” spyware to be used against targets, researchers at a Canadian university have said.

Citizen Lab, a digital investigations research unit at the University of Toronto, said it believed dozens of devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera had been compromised by spyware delivered through ads run by Discover-Tech, which describes itself as a specialised digital advertising agency.

  • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zipEnglish
    5·
    6 hours ago

    An ad blocker is an internet condom, and anybody who doesn’t use one is a fucking idiot.

    I’ve been using device level ad blocks for something like a decade now and have been using DNS level plus device level ad blocks for about two or three years now.

  • stopforgettingit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    38·
    18 hours ago

    The real research: https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/

    Here is the boiled down points from this

    1. you open a page that has an ad served from Discovery-Tech ad inventory

    2. the ad has a standard script in to that calls back to the home server and passes your advertising ID (cookie ID on desktop or mobile ID on mobile) plus your IP

    3. there is a third party that has compiled a list of ad ID + IP that effectively de-anonymizes users. This is used to target specific people. The info passed by the ad is compared against the target list. If there is no match to the target nothing further happens.

    4. if a match is found it returns javascript that runs on the page. It finger prints the device then it checks for an exploit.

    5. if the exploit it is looking for is found the exploit corrupts memory in the rendering engine, achieves native code execution, escapes the sandbox, and installs the spyware.

    And, yes, ad blocker software would stop this. If the ad cannot render it cannot call back to the mothership. The only exception to this would be if the ad was served first party, like the website you were visiting was also hosting the ad. Or if you are on a device using a browser that is part of a app that does not have ad blocking, like the built in browser for instagram.

    Here is what they did not say

    We don’t know which browser, OS, or application vulnerability was used at Al Jazeera. It could be a unknown zero day one or a one that is known but only works on certain older versions of software.

    Adding in a standard YSK how to delete your advertising ID from your mobile device.

  • mx_smith@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    20 hours ago

    These articles suck, in that they want me to disable my ad blocker to read an article about how ads can now do malicious stuff by just being viewed. Then there is no info as to what it’s doing or how it’s doing whatever malicious things it claims, let alone the OS this affects.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      19 hours ago

      That’s when I use my ad blocker to zap the nagging. I ought to see if there’s some list to subscribe to to circumvent those automatically…

  • TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.caEnglish
    37·
    21 hours ago

    Once again proving that my PiHole is an essential security component on my network instead of just something that blocks annoying ads.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    19 hours ago

    It doesn’t explicitly say how it works, though I imagine it’s just looking for vulnerable os & user-agents

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    19 hours ago

    According to the report, Controlium is able to harvest a user’s identity and IP address when the user is shown a seemingly benign custom-created ad – for example, for a digital game or a telecoms service. If the user has been selected as a target for hacking, a mercenary spyware firm can then send a malicious code containing spyware to their device, the researchers say.

    They say that millions of users worldwide have been served ads by Discover-Tech since 2024, including in Yemen, Brazil, Mexico and Czechia.

    Related work by the research group Confiant also suggests that Discover-Tech’s ads have been shown to users of the networks of government entities in Europe and the US, as well as the UN, Nato, the international criminal court and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

    “It’s disastrous that major ad vendors and organisations apparently were neither able to detect nor prevent the company’s malicious advertising operations for years,” said Wolfie Christl, a researcher at Citizen Lab. “The way the online advertising ecosystem works today is a security threat for states, the private sector, civil society and everyone else alike.”