Google and Facebook served ads that silently hijacked phones with spyware

Ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware"

Citizen Lab's report "Exposing AdFection" reveals that Discover-Tech, an Israeli firm posing as an ad-tech company, used Google, Facebook, and other major ad platforms to target individuals and deliver zero-click malware that took over devices with no user interaction. Certified by Google, Microsoft, Yandex, Comcast's Beeswax, and IAB, it gained access to over four billion ad auctions. Al Jazeera workers were among the targets, attacked with malware from Candiru. The fix, Cory Doctorow argues, is to block programmatic ads entirely.