Hello and welcome to the Tuesday, November 29th, 2020 edition of the Sandtonet Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich and I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Ever since the attack of Russia against Ukraine in February, one feature that has become very popular on social

media are various drone footage videos and such, usually showing some of the battles in

Ukraine. Now, what I've lately observed in particular on Twitter is that there are certain actors that

are using these videos to push scarier. I don't call them Malware because I'm not

having sure if there are actually malicious. Some of them are certainly not sort of obviously

malicious, but what happens is when you're clicking on what you think is the video, you're being really redirected to a different website.

The website itself doesn't actually have any obvious ads, but you'll see pop-ups alerting you of your device being infected, and then you're being redirected to software that supposedly helps you fix

the problem.

Now, on iOS, what I see is a lot of VPN applications being advertised that way.

These are legitimate, if you want to call them, because they're in the iOS App Store,

but of course, I wouldn't really trust an application that is advertised using that false

pretense.

If I'm visiting the same website using my desktop, a laptop, a Mac, then usually I'm

being advertised Mac Keeper, which is sort of

cleanup software for the Mac. Again, probably wouldn't trust it if it's being advertised

using false claims that your system is infected. I've also seen McGaffy antivirus being advertised

that way.

So typically these are some referral deals where the website sending you to the McAfee website is getting some cut for making you buy their software.

In particular with McAfee, I've reported them in the past to McAfee, hoping that they

wouldn't really approve of this behavior of their affiliates.

So far, I haven't really seen it make a difference.

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