Preventing Malvertising in your Organization

Advertisements might seem like something that poses no risks to your organization. Most people think of advertisements as annoying but not necessarily dangerous. It is also likely that you are one of many people who have installed an ad blocker on your own machine or personal devices. We’ll explain to you how to prevent malvertising.

However, having an ad blocker has more utility in your organization than you might think. Aside from giving your users the luxury of not having to watch ads on YouTube, you’re also protecting them, and your organization from Malvertising.

What is Malvertising?

The meaning of malvertising is the practice of using advertisements online to steal data or install malware on a machine. As you might expect, enticing advertisements are used to convince people to click on them and then either install something or provide sensitive information. The website the ad is on might even contribute to the problem since most websites don’t even control which ads are shown on their site, fooling someone that might think that Spotify’s website is safe, but that ad can lead anywhere.

How to prevent malvertising and malware?

While there isn’t anything that can guarantee 100% protection, the following should help you prevent it from affecting your organization as much as possible.

• Have an ad blocker
  Make sure your whole organization is supplied with a good ad blocker to prevent seeing advertisements in the first place. Below you can read up on how you can ensure you’ve got an ad blocker on every machine.
• Up-to-date Antivirus
  Regardless of which Antivirus you use, it is important to make sure it is always up-to-date, something we do have reports for in our report library, both for workstations and servers.
• Up-to-date Operating System
  Malware often relies on system vulnerabilities to abuse. So it is important you have the latest security updates installed, something you can also check with our Patch Tuesday audits.
• User training
  As with most potential threats on the web, the best way to protect your organization is to train the employees to recognize potentially dangerous links, ads and more.

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