Foreign Malvertising Endangers U.S. Cybersecurity, Congress Told

Foreign actors can use advertisements to spread malicious code to government computers, and neither the U.S. nor industry is doing enough to stop the cyberthreat, an online browser company warned Congress.

Popular online browsers such as Apple Inc.'s Safari, Alphabet Inc.'s Chrome, and Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox are vulnerable to attacks by nation state entities that know how to weaponize targeted ads, an executive for San Francisco-based browser Brave Software Inc. wrote in a Nov. 13 letter to House and Senate homeland security committee leaders.

Such “malvertising” attacks threaten U.S. government computers and devices because their systems don’t automatically block ads, ...