A new scam seems to be making rounds on the internet where a legitimate-looking Amazon ad on Google is leading users to a fake Microsoft tech support website. First spotted by BleepingComputer, some people are seeing a real-looking Amazon advertisement in Google Search results with the legitimate URL, clicking on which redirects them to a website that pretends to be an alert from the company's built-in antivirus solution - Microsoft Defender. Similar to other popular tech support scams, the newly discovered tech support scam suggests that your machine is infected by the 'ads(exe).financetrack(2).dll' malware and that 'access to this PC has been blocked for security reasons'. Also, opening the page makes the browser go into full-screen mode, which makes it hard to people to get out of the page. While you can terminate Google Chrome from Task Manager or close it from the taskbar, the problem is that when you relaunch the browser, it will ask you to restore previously closed tabs, which reopens the page. This is not the first time a scam like this found its way into Google Search results. Last year, researchers at Malwarebytes found out about a similar-looking YouTube ad with a legitimate-looking URL that led to the same Windows Defender tech support scam. In the last few years, phishing attacks via Google Ads have seen a huge increase and it is still unclear why the tech giant allows advertisers to use legitimate-looking URLs to post these real-looking ads. To protect against such browser-based attacks, just close the tab or browser. In case the page goes full screen, press F11 or the Esc key on your keyboard to go back to windowed mode and close the tab immediately. One can also use ad or script-blocking extensions.
