When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn What Does Clipboard Hijacking Attack Mean?
A clipboard hijacking attack is when a hacker gains control of a personal computer’s clipboard and replaces its contents with its own malicious contents, which usually inlcudes a link to a malware website. Flash banner ads are used by hackers to hijack clipboards and attack security software.
Techopedia Explains Clipboard Hijacking Attack
Clipboard hijacking is an attack that copies a link to a computer’s clipboard. This link often cannot be deleted unless the computer is restarted. The malicious content in the clipboard is a seemingly innocuous link to a website that a user is redirected to. That website advertises a product such as anti-virus software, which is actually a spyware application. This method is called malvertizement, which comes from the words malicious and advertisement. The insidious nature of this attack is that this link gets inadvertently pasted from the clipboard along with any text, so users spread it unintentionally by pasting it in their email, blog articles and comments, documents and other mediums where text might be pasted.
