Dhaka, Oct. 17 -- Governments have found a new way to spy on targets: turning online advertising into a covert route for planting surveillance software on their devices, in what researchers describe as a first-of-its-kind discovery, reports The Independent.

The technique, dubbed "adfection" by researchers at Citizen Lab, a digital rights project at the University of Toronto, exploits the automated system that runs billions of ad auctions every day across the internet.

When a user visits a website, ad space is sold to the highest bidder in a split-second process.

Attackers can hijack this system to deliver what appear to be ordinary ads but are in fact malicious code capable of installing surveillance software -- without any click from ...