About Articles Past issues Sign in Subscribe 04 Aug 2026 3 min read Articles Online advertising giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are necessary The hacked digital advertiser was caught serving malicious ads that allowed hackers to steal a victim's cryptocurrency. Photo by David Pupăză / Unsplash. Online ads provider Adform was hacked. On July 27, the company began serving ads containing malicious code. The company says in its latest annual report that its serves 1.5 billion ads to people's devices daily.
According to security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who first revealed the incident, some of the code that Adform used to load its ads on its customers' websites was maliciously altered. The code was designed to trigger when it loaded in a victim's web browser.
The malicious code replaced a victim's crypto wallet address in their computer's clipboard with crypto wallet addresses controlled by the hacker. The code replaces the crypto addresses in the clipboard every three seconds, all but guaranteeing that the victim will inadvertently paste in the attacker's crypto wallet address and send their crypto to the hacker instead of its intended destination.
If you've ever needed another reason to use an ad-blocker, this is it. By blocking ads, you can prevent pervasive tracking, surveillance, and yes, even malware, from landing on your computer.
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This article was aggregated automatically by CyberWire Daily's newsfeed engine. Original reporting: this.weekinsecurity.com.
