Marketing tech
fromThe Cyber Express
20 hours agoGemini Ad Safety Targets Surge In AI-Generated Scam Ads
Google's Gemini ad safety systems blocked over 8.3 billion harmful ads in 2025, focusing on early detection and combating AI-generated scams.
The service, referred to as 1Campaign, provides hackers with a one-stop-shop for running malicious ads and enabling fraud "at scale," a recent report by cybersecurity company Varonis uncovered. Using just a single dashboard, hackers can cloak malicious content from security researchers, ad platform reviewers, and automated scanners - who instead see a benign white page - and target general users with phishing or scam attempts.
Instead, they hide it in the small "From:" metadata field under the video card, which apparently isn't scanned by the social media platform for malicious links. Next, (likely) the same actors ask Grok via a reply to the ad something about the post, like "where is this video from," or "what is the link to this video." Grok parses the hidden "From:" field and replies with the full malicious link in clickable format, allowing users to click it and go straight to the malicious site.