5 ms·
Rogue Ad Attempted to Redirect Wired Readers
- joshfraser 15y agoToo many people underestimate the power of JavaScript (for both good and evil)
- cheald 15y agoHappened to me on Grooveshark, too. Made me turn Adblock back on for 'em.
- wanderr 15y agoWe try to prevent malicious redirects by interrupting navigation away from the site with a JavaScript "are you sure?" prompt, but in an effort to not be too annoying to users who really do want to leave we only pop it up if music is playing.
- cheald 15y agoThis happened as I was changing playlists, so that makes sense. The actual behavior was rather odd - there was a popunder, then Grooveshark closed, then the popunder came to the foreground maximized, with the usual ZOMG YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTEDS scare crap. If you can give me assurance that the offending ad's been dealt with, I'd be happy to turn adblock back off. I appreciate the service and want to support it, but malware ads lose my good will pretty quickly.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoI presume this is the same nastiness that got Ars flagged by Google's anti-malware filter earlier today?
- mike-cardwell 15y agoThis is what happens when large numbers of websites allow a central authority to run arbitrary code within their sites DOM. The central authority becomes an excellent distribution vector for malware so an extremely lucrative target. People willing to block all cross-origin requests and manually whitelist only those required (Firefox RequestPolicy addon) are the best protected from these problems. NoScript users also get brilliant protection. Even AdBlock users are considerably safer than your average user from this problem.