Malvertising vs. SEO Malicious advertising, also known as “malvertising,” refers to the use of online advertising to spread malware or to redirect users to malicious websites. Threat actors leveraging malvertising often target various advertisement programs such as Google Adsense, Bing Ads, and Yahoo Gemini. To display the malvertisement, you often must mimic the user search with the same search engine. These advertisement programs use a Traffic Distribution System (TDS), which is a type of network infrastructure that is used to distribute network traffic across multiple servers.