UK publishers and consumers in particular face an unprecedented barrage of cloaked Bitcoin scams
This time, the rumors are true: fake celebrity bitcoin attacks skyrocketed in October, with noteworthy assaults on UK publishers and consumers. Faces well-known to UK consumers like Simon Cowell, Zoe Bell, Chris Tarrant, and Emma Willis are hawking various bogus investment schemes on prominent British publishers, with a whopping 12X rise in unique attacks month over month.
Known as FizzCore, these phishing campaigns bypass ad platform audits by using cloaking technology to hide their malicious intent. Highly targeted, the actual malicious creatives and landing pages that hijack celebrity likenesses only appear in consumers that match specific criteria such as device, geolocation, or audience charateristic.
Intriguingly, the domains and pages hosting the actual schemes are being regularly reused, sometimes with slight updates (as noted in this report on fake celebrity endorsements from May). The innocuous landing pages used to cover up the actual phishing scams, however, are being cycled through rapidly, most likely created by AI.
The Media Trust’s Digital Security & Operations team believes this assault will only gather steam going into the holidays due to the success threat actors have had penetrating publisher and ad platform defenses. To protect yourself and digital audiences, consider:
- Analyzing ad inventory with actual devices as FizzCore is highly capable of recognizing “test” environments meant to sniff out the attack.
- Because FizzCore is highly targeted and only appears when parameters are met, scrutinize incoming ad inventory with a variety of device and audience profiles.
- Leveraging a real-time security solution to block FizzCore attacks before they render on sites and apps
