Imagine surfing the web on a normal trustworthy website. On the top of the page you see an ad for something that interests you, e.g. the newest smartphone you like for an unbelievable cheap price. You click on the ad. Why wouldn’t you? You’re on a trustworthy site after all. The ad turns out to be a hoax, there are no smartphones for a price that cheap. Over the next few days you notice some strange behaviour from your computer.  Turns out, your computer is infected with some malware. How could this happen? In this case, you’ve been a victim of malvertising. Malvertising is a word composed of Malware and Advertising. As you probably already suspect right now, it means infecting users with malware via advertising on the internet. In this series of articles, I want to give you an introduction to malvertising, first by looking at some basics of advertising on the internet.

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