With the world’s most popular adult entertainment website receiving more than 64 million visitors a day, there’s no surprise that PornHub is favourable among those wanting to hack into people’s computers. Over the last year, PornHub was hacked. Users were exposed to a malvertising campaign, which once in place, gave hackers the chance to take control of your computer to gain information.

The adverts seemed harmless, like your every day popup, but the malware, specifically named Kovter was disguising harmful files within downloads. The most common of these downloads was a prompt to install Flash onto your hard drive. It could have also come in the form of a Flash Player update too.

So what does Kovter do? Well, as said above, the malware is inserted into a common and recognisable download file like a Flash Player update. From here, users would install that file on their computers, unleashing that malware virus into your machine.

From here, attackers are able to steal your information from your computer. According to Proofpoint, the cyber-criminal group was named KovCoreG and targeted Chrome and Firefox users in the USA, UK, Australia and Canada.

It’s surprising in this day and age that a campaign such as this could run for an entire year, knowing the size of the umbrella corporation that PornHub belongs to. A whole year is definitely more than enough time to do some decent damage. Proofpoint were the ones that alerted PornHub about the campaign.