They each allow advertisers to spoof links with unverified "vanity URLs", laundering trust in their systems, while simultaneously deflecting blame onto advertisers when these mechanisms are exploited for fraud.
You can help raise awareness by resharing/rehosting my message on social media and reaching out to your elected government officials. The systemic enablement of link fraud by Big Tech needs to end.
Examples help to explain it to other people who need to know.
Ad shows up:
Text: Check Your [Retailer] Gift Card
Display URL: https://www.[retailer].com/
Ads always have redirection involved, typically through a third party, to track ROI, conversions, etc. How the attackers take advantage of this is their redirection redirects to the real site if it's the Googlebot or from an IP range known to be owned/used by Google (or other filtering based on location, language, etc). If it's not, it redirects to the malicious site.
One solution is that the first hop in the chain has to match the domain of the display URL. That at least somewhat shows you can have a redirection that you control on the display domain. Of course, there could be an open redirect on that display domain, but those are becoming increasingly rare.
Work for a large retailer and we dealt with this a lot a year or two ago. Built custom monitoring to detect it and we sent gobs of data back to Google showing it happening. Still pops up every once in a while, but they've made some improvements in their detection/prevention.
Does anyone know why this isn't the default? I can't think of any legitimate reason why a brand wouldn't want to have their true domain displayed?
If they want to redirect to a third-party they can implement it on their own website.
Since their customers are the people running the trackers and giving them money, they listen to the advertisers and not the cattle who are clicking on ads.
I think many people think that advertising is "Kohl's goes to Google and buys an ad" - it's much more often Kohls hires an agency that hires an agency that manages a independent company that fills out the actual ads, and they all want to track their piece of the pie.
But some people use services like ClickCease which helps mitigate click fraud (e.g. if your competitor clicks your ad over and over, ClickCease and similar services can automatically exclude their IP so they can’t click your ads.. or at least that’s the pitch)
Some of these services work by being the first hop in the redirect chain.
I was under the impression that Google whitelists services allowed to be used for redirects.
I tried:
target gift card balance
chilis gift card balance
kohls gift card balance
sephora gift card balance
My post was more to illustrate an example of how this had been done in the past and briefly explain the tactics of how the threat actors were able to do it.
I can't find a single sponsored result on Google for your search query.
Checking Jimmy John's, Subway, and Whole Foods, they are all seemingly targeted by shady non-official gift card checkers, which for all I know harvest gift cards. But none of these are sponsored, and only Whole Foods' target from Buyatab was a first result.
So I am still confused about a concrete, real example. Like I understand it exists, but maybe someone should share a real example.
To be fair, there are other companies that are not helping this problem. This is the legit official website for a MasterCard giftcard[0]. Seriously!?! Why is there a whole new fucking domain? Mastercard.com redirects to mastercard.us. That's weird enough but you're telling me we can't have mastercard.{com,us}/giftcard or giftcard.mastercard.{com,us}?
The reason I bring this up is because legitimate companies are teaching users bad behavior and it makes it difficult for them to develop good bullshit/spam detection. Let's even check these two websites and their whois: [1] [2]. What here tells me which one is legit? You might go check the cert and find "This website does not supply ownership information." in the blurb but unless you look at the actual cert it says the organization. So even legit companies are not making it easy to identify them. Or you might even get antagonistic behavior like target does[3], which will redirect you to a login page. Yes... a login page for a gift card... what a fucking joke. They act like they want their customers to get hacked.
I'm not saying Google and the social media companies are not responsible (they definitely have some) but just saying that the legitimate companies create an environment that makes it easy for spammers and scammers to deceive people. Normal people are not going to have the means to actually verify the validity of a website and legitimate websites aren't even making attempts to make this easy, arguably they are just creating more noise.
[0] https://www.mastercardgiftcard.com/
[1] https://www.walmart.com/account/giftcards/balance -- https://www.whois.com/whois/walmart.com
[2] https://www.walmartgift.com/wmgift -- https://www.whois.com/whois/walmartgift.com
In your scenario, the attacker is creating ads pretending to be the [retailer]?