An ongoing marketing campaign that infiltrates official web sites with malicious JavaScript injects to advertise Chinese language-language playing platforms has ballooned to compromise roughly 150,000 websites up to now.
“The menace 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/facet safety analyst Himanshu Anand said in a brand new evaluation.
As of writing, there are over 135,800 sites containing the JavaScript payload, per statistics from PublicWWW.
As documented by the web site safety firm final month, the marketing campaign entails infecting web sites with malicious JavaScript that is designed to hijack the person’s browser window to redirect website guests to pages selling playing platforms.
The redirections have been discovered to happen through JavaScript hosted on 5 totally different domains (e.g., “zuizhongyj[.]com”) that, in flip, serve the primary payload chargeable for performing the redirects.
c/facet mentioned it additionally noticed one other variant of the marketing campaign that entails injecting scripts and iframe components in HTML impersonating official betting web sites reminiscent of 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 internet content material.
“This assault demonstrates how menace actors always adapt, rising their attain and utilizing new layers of obfuscation,” Anand mentioned. “Consumer-side assaults like these are on the rise, with increasingly more findings daily.”
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 through injected redirect scripts that make use of a distributed community of Site visitors Path System (TDS) nodes hosted on compromised web sites,” safety researcher Denis Sinegubko said.
“These scripts redirect website guests to numerous rip-off pages by visitors dealer networks related to VexTrio, one of many largest recognized cybercriminal affiliate networks that leverages refined DNS strategies, visitors distribution methods, and area technology algorithms to ship malware and scams throughout world networks.”
The assaults begin with injecting a dynamically generated script into the WordPress website, finally 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 by PHP code inserted into energetic plugins, whereas additionally taking steps to disable safety plugins, delete malicious admin customers, and siphon official admin credentials to fulfill their goals.
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 big turning level on this long-running marketing campaign,” Sinegubko noted. “Whereas the operators have demonstrated exceptional adaptability by rapidly transitioning to different visitors monetization strategies, the fast infrastructure modifications and partial outages recommend some stage of operational influence.”
