Ad bidding network caught slinging ransomware Attackers are using Flash exploits and foisting ransomware through real time advertising bidding networks, FireEye researchers say. The attacks link to malicious or compromised advertising sites which participate in real time bidding systems in which ad inventory is sold to and by publishers. More than 1700 malicious …
I switched Adbolock off for a while and kept seeing images of some woman with hideous surgically enhanced lips. Also all these "weird tips" click bait shit.
It's switched back on for good now. Sorry ElReg but I would not be buying a sever anyway.
My Firefox is locked down tighter than a very locked down thing :)
For sites that don't play well I'll use Chrome and then delete all history etc.
I think we give the advertisers way too much latitude.
Years ago, when the medium was restricted to print, ads were static, didn't do anything when you poked them, and if you were lucky, were printed in colour with reasonable resolution.
Then the web came along, and so we could have ads that you could click on to take you to another site. Image maps meant different portions inside the ad could take you to different pages.
Then GIF89a came along, and the web became this flashing mess of distracting adverts. Thankfully Java never caught on as an advertising platform.
Then we got Shockwave Flash, which Adobe eventually acquired when they swallowed up Macromedia. So now ads could not only move, they could also play sound and video and be interactive!
Great. The underlying technologies have also been found to be egregious security holes.
Time to turn back the clock I say. If advertisers can't get their message across in a single STATIC hyperlinked image, they don't deserve the advertising space.
If I think your ad looks interesting, I'll click on it to have a look. Otherwise just accept that I'm not interested and move on.
At least with fax machines you had the fun of replying with solid black pages to use up all of the advertiser's toner as revenge.
I heard a rumour that it would be possible to get some fax machine's to overheat and catch light if you sent them 50+ pages of solid all black. Not that I ever tried this out with annoying fax spamming spammers... innocent whistle....
Back in 2000 it used to get so bad for our fax machine it could print through half a ream of paper overnight!
Years ago, when the medium was restricted to printYears ago, advertisers spammed your fax machine with lists of 'sale' items, causing it to run out of paper. They were just as shitty then as they are now.
Years ago I didn't own a fax machine. Our first "fax" machine was a multi-function printer, prior to this if we wanted to send a fax, we used a scanner and a modem attached to a computer.
That said, unsolicited commercial communication, whether it be by telephone, fax, email, post or other means, is a different matter to what is being discussed here in that it is unsolicited: you have not made prior contact with the sender. In many countries, this is covered by existing legislation.
As for The Register and other ad-supported sites, your browser made a "GET http://forums.theregister.co.uk/…" request to this site, ergo, you chose to receive that page and the ads are part of it. I think it's the collateral damage that some of these ads are doing which we're objecting to, whether it be visual distractions, unwelcome sounds or malware.
A move to ban all formats apart from (baseline) PNG and JPEG images which are then either imagemapped or hyperlinked to one or more destination pages would not only address the above issues, but would also allow the ad to be shown to a wider audience.
I'm yet to see a graphical web browser made post-1998 that does not support the formats I'm suggesting. Malware isn't impossible with these formats, but relies on vulnerabilities in specific implementations which are wide and varied, unlike Flash for which there are only a small handful of implementations (I know of two: Adobe's implementation and Gnash) that seem to be universally exploitable.
Installing AdBlock Plus is always part of installing a browser on a new computer for me. When I see the crap that people put up with when browsing without AdBlock Plus, I'm amazed people still use the web. When I show people how the web looks with AdBlock installed they're amazed at the difference.
I do feel guilty for some of the sites I read a lot (e.g. El Reg.) I don't know how much El Reg looses by me not seeing adverts, but I'd be quite happy to make a donation/payment/subscription to compensate. (remember children, there's no such thing as a free lunch)
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Does anyone outside of 'care in the community' still allow Flash on their machines?
Or does removing flash not stop the main cause of issues?
If a site or entry demands Flash, then I pass by and get on with something useful.
The problem with such as Adblock is that they have been allowing crap advertisers to pay to have their beloved spam and malware pass through onto users machines.
If the advertisers are so damned stupid that they encourage this crap, they have only themselves to blame when we try to block their desires.
I used to use Adblock Plus but got tired of having to set the option to block ALL ads and not allow the paid for advertisers through whenever I did an install on a new browser/machine.
There are alternatives though, Adblock Edge for Firefox or (Adblock Latitude for Palemoon which is what I use), don't have the whitelist that Adblock Plus has.
I don't use AdBlock, I used FlashBlock for a long time, and I still use NoScript.
I uninstalled Flash in January and I haven't missed it yet - I only really used it for YouTube, but they've gone HTML5 Video for everything now, so I just didn't need it.
The ad networks can serve me images, but no JavaScript and no Flash.
Like you I binned Flash (late last year) and only have come across a few sites that won't work without it and they get bypassed. Also using Noscript but find the Adblock forks such as I mentioned before useful for selectively blocking images. For instance a custom filter removes all the junk from the homepage of the Reg but leaves any subsequent pages/articles images displayed.
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The staff here seem to think that everything is fine and dandy with the new design.
Think otherwise? Why not comment in the following thread?
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obligatory "El Reg is supported by ads, please whitelist us to continue reading more top-notch tech news" post
And yet this site seems to have gone overboard with the advertising in recent years, going as far as giving more prominence to an ad at the top of the page even before the page title itself. On a widescreen monitor only ~50% of the page seems to be displaying actual content - and the less said about the amount of content space within that 50% taken up by that bloody big headline image the better.
Perhaps if more thought was given to how people wanted to use this site rather than how you'd like them to use it you'd find that less people installed that sort of thing?
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I find it rather amazing that while the parasites, er, fine upstanding advertisers have access to a tool which can tell if I'm blocking their adverts (hint: I am), important sites that still insist on flash and/or cross-site scripting (e.g. banks, and pretty much anywhere if you want to pay online) don't seem to be able to detect that you're not running them until it's too late...
f**k me, I agree! Having heard how the AdBlock people profiteer from de-adblocking certain advertisers, yeah, f**k AdBlock, there are better alternatives.
p.s. please don't weep how the (digital) world would collapse and millions of developers, website owners, and ebay sweatshops would collapse because they're entirely dependent on advertising revenue.
"Having heard how the AdBlock people profiteer from de-adblocking certain advertisers"
Who'd you hear that from?
https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements
"Whitelisting is free for all small- and medium websites and blogs."
https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-advertising-before-and-after
Methinks a bridge somewhere is missing its troll.
"Whitelisting is free for all small- and medium websites and blogs."
But equally, from the agreements page you linked to:
That's why we are being paid by some larger properties
Playing devil's advocate: so it's not free for anybody else? Profiteering is OK as long as you're selective about it?
seems to require Javascript.
I block Javascript by default and if an unknown site requires Javascript to function I look elsewhere for the information I require. If I find a huge list of scripts from umpteen different domains are required to access site content I never visit that site again.
I did enable Javascript for http://sitexw.fr/fuckadblock/ out of interest and was informed that Adblock was not active, so I enabled session cookies (although in the source code, cookies are not referenced) and my Adblock was still not detected. <shrug>
I really don't care because if ever an advertising network finds a way around adblock, they will certainly find a way into my hosts file.
My Amiga got infected once... that taught me to move the write tab on my floppies, I had do disinfect dozens. It was a lesson well learned and got me into studying viruses. I have never had a virus on a production PC I have owned and my first PC was an Epson PCe. (I have purposely infected many in the course of research)
Of course I could have been and could still be riddled with many undetectable ones all fighting for dominance... I just don't know I am not that smart.
If in doubt run suspect code in a VM using Sysinternals wonderful tools. I guess I am preaching to the wise. It is the average user that needs to learn this, not IT professionals that read an IT news site.
I wanted to use a smiley face but that makes me feel I am trying to be smug and I am not, I am just constantly vigilant, so I Meh in the advertisers and malvertisers general direction.
"Researchers probing deeper discovered the studied advertising sites used a tool dubbed 'F**k AdBlock' designed to detect 'nasty' ad blockers across popular web browsers."
Can anyone say "misuse of computers act" ?
If the ad companies do business in the UK, or any of the advertisers in question are, it might be an interesting question.
"If it's the adserver that's been hacked then all bets are off really."
no need. Malware pushers have been haunting banner ads since forever (I first saw them in 1997)
The usual MO is to buy into a banner-ad vendor with a campaign featuring benign content for several months, then start slipping noxious items in later.
You don't need a hacked adserver when the payload is 100% in the content.
I would not run random code on a server. So why should I run it on my personal machine?
If (it's a very big if) that random code came with a certificate proving it had been extensively tested, that it was believed by reputable authorities to be harmless, and that I was covered by ad-industry insurance in case it did any damage, then only only then might I allow it to put a big flashing distraction in the corner of my screen.
But until that happens, Adblock is an essential layer in my security perimeter.
Once again, by not keeping their own house in order, the ad networks act as a better recruiting sergeant for Adblocking than comments, forum posts and word of mouth ever could. I don't think I've ever encountered another industry with such poor regard for its own survival.
Stop the flashing, jumping shouty stuff, stick to static images or text at a reasonable ratio of screen acreage to content and maybe I'll start unblocking a few regularly used sites I actually like. Till then its Adblock on every new install, with all options on.
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