An ongoing marketing campaign that infiltrates authentic web sites with malicious JavaScript injects to advertise Chinese language-language playing platforms has ballooned to compromise roughly 150,000 websites so far.
“The risk actor has barely revamped their interface however remains to be counting on an iframe injection to show a full-screen overlay within the customer’s browser,” c/aspect safety analyst Himanshu Anand mentioned in a brand new evaluation.
As of writing, there are over 135,800 websites containing the JavaScript payload, per statistics from PublicWWW.
As documented by the web site safety firm final month, the marketing campaign includes infecting web sites with malicious JavaScript that is designed to hijack the consumer’s browser window to redirect website guests to pages selling playing platforms.
The redirections have been discovered to happen by way of JavaScript hosted on 5 completely different domains (e.g., “zuizhongyj[.]com”) that, in flip, serve the primary payload answerable for performing the redirects.
c/aspect mentioned it additionally noticed one other variant of the marketing campaign that entails injecting scripts and iframe components in HTML impersonating authentic betting web sites resembling Bet365 by making use of official logos and branding.
The top purpose is to serve a fullscreen overlay utilizing CSS that causes the malicious playing touchdown web page to be displayed when visiting one of many contaminated websites in place of the particular net content material.
“This assault demonstrates how risk actors continually adapt, growing their attain and utilizing new layers of obfuscation,” Anand mentioned. “Consumer-side assaults like these are on the rise, with an increasing number of findings every single day.”
The disclosure comes as GoDaddy revealed particulars of a long-running malware operation dubbed DollyWay World Domination that has compromised over 20,000 web sites globally since 2016. As of February 2025, over 10,000 distinctive WordPress websites have fallen sufferer to the scheme.
“The present iteration […] primarily targets guests of contaminated WordPress websites by way of injected redirect scripts that make use of a distributed community of Visitors Course System (TDS) nodes hosted on compromised web sites,” safety researcher Denis Sinegubko mentioned.
“These scripts redirect website guests to varied rip-off pages via visitors dealer networks related to VexTrio, one of many largest identified cybercriminal affiliate networks that leverages refined DNS methods, visitors distribution techniques, and area era algorithms to ship malware and scams throughout international networks.”
The assaults begin with injecting a dynamically generated script into the WordPress website, in the end redirecting guests to VexTrio or LosPollos hyperlinks. The exercise can be mentioned to have used advert networks like PropellerAds to monetize visitors from compromised websites.
The malicious injections on the server-side are facilitated via PHP code inserted into energetic plugins, whereas additionally taking steps to disable safety plugins, delete malicious admin customers, and siphon authentic admin credentials to satisfy their targets.
GoDaddy has since revealed that the DollyWay TDS leverages a distributed community of compromised WordPress websites as TDS and command-and-control (C2) nodes, reaching 9-10 million month-to-month web page impressions. Moreover, the VexTrio redirect URLs have been discovered to be obtained from the LosPollos visitors dealer community.
Round November 2024, DollyWay operators are mentioned to have deleted a number of of their C2/TDS servers, with the TDS script acquiring the redirect URLs from a Telegram channel named trafficredirect.
“The disruption of DollyWay’s relationship with LosPollos marks a major turning level on this long-running marketing campaign,” Sinegubko famous. “Whereas the operators have demonstrated exceptional adaptability by shortly transitioning to various visitors monetization strategies, the speedy infrastructure adjustments and partial outages counsel some stage of operational impression.”
