Think your phone is safe? Discover-Tech ads are hacking people silently
Forget clicking sketchy links—your phone is now being turned into a surveillance device just by loading a standard ad banner.
Researchers from the University of Toronto just blew the lid off something straight out of a thriller. An Israeli ad firm called Discover-Tech has been using a tool called Controlium to shove spyware onto phones without the user clicking a single thing.
These aren't just annoying pop-ups. These are zero-click exploits delivered through totally normal-looking ads. Once your phone loads the ad, Controlium starts scraping your identity and location. It’s been happening for years across both Android and iOS, affecting hundreds of thousands of sites.
Even journalists at Al Jazeera got hit. It took analyzing four billion bidding records to even catch them, which makes one wonder how many other "ad agencies" are actually just private intelligence firms with a budget for Google banner space.
The entire global digital advertising machine is effectively a massive, unpatched security vulnerability that anyone with a checkbook can exploit.
Source: The Guardian
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