Adf.ly allows its users to shorten their web links to share on social networks or YouTube. However, when clicking on these shortened links, people will have to watch an advertising page before they can access the target website.
According to Bkav representative, besides taking advantage of Adf.ly, hackers also use SMB weakness to spread this virus on a large scale. SMB vulnerability used to be exploited by malware WannaCry to infect more than 300,000 computers in only a few hours.
Statistics from Bkav shows that over half of the number of computers in Vietnam has this weakness.
Vice President of Bkav Vu Ngoc Son, who is responsible for Anti-malware, shared that as Bkav had predicted at the end of 2017, malware to mine digital currency did bloom right at the beginning of 2018, stating that the lucrative profit from cryptocurrency was so large that hackers would enthusiastically continue to spread this kind of virus more and more in the near future.
Bkav experts warn that users should update their software with the latest patch, along with installing effective anti-virus programs with firewall on their computers to be automatically protected from similar viruses.
Statistics from Bkav displays that in the first 3 months of 2018, about 1,095 websites in Vietnam, 56 of which are official websites of government bodies and educational institutes, were attacked by hackers.
