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Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed

253 points by speckx 3mo ago

functionmouse 3mo ago
I have a feeling everyone with understanding of the situation or even a vague malaise opening a news article and being bombarded with popups that intercept their attention knows why ad blockers are needed, and any perceived "discourse" to the contrary is one sided, from the ad agencies and media platforms that largely and subversively direct the narrative. It's getting harder by the day to tell sentiment apart from narrative.
- ksenzee 3mo ago
  "You will be annoyed" and "you will be served malware" are two different classes of need. The first is enough to get me running Firefox/uBlock Origin on my own devices. The second is what got me to run it at work.
- amelius 3mo ago
  Nobody wants ads (*) but somehow they are never banned. Makes you wonder, are we living in a democracy or not? (*) shown at inconvenient moments and tracking the user; yellow pages were fine
  - RajT88 3mo ago
    I do not recall ever hearing of an organized effort to ban ads. These days, good luck getting bipartisan agreement, especially with all the dark money in politics being legalized and normalized. That said... The modern internet is built off many free services paid for by people who buy stuff from ads. It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Hosting costs money. I could see a dystopia without ads where a government provides free hosting for citizens. That quickly becomes "thought police" when an authoritarian leading head of state comes in. If we pretend like that will not happen, I think we would have a much more wonderful internet.
    - amelius 3mo ago
      > It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Don't you see the problem with that statement? Ads are profitable, and we are paying for them, indirectly, through buying products and services. Adtech takes a chunk of that profit. Therefore, we pay more than we should!
      - benj111 3mo ago
        So you are paying more than you should for a loaf of bread because your local shop is making a profit? because if you went to the factory you could buy the same loaf for less? Of course you could make the bread yourself for even less because the factory is making a profit, and grow the wheat yourself for even less because the farmer is making a profit. You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because there is no price you 'should' be paying. Further I'm not sure how you imagine this working? The retailer gets to decide prices or not? They get to decide if they advertise or not? The advertiser's have competition? The retailers? Retailers are presumably choosing to advertise because they think it's worth it, thus it is? You are free to choose to buy those products, that will feed into their decision whether and how to advertise.
        functionmouse 3mo ago
        Are you equating the shopkeeper across the street earning 15 an hour to sell me my loaf of bread to the advertisement industrial complex?
        benj111 3mo ago
        Why are we appealing to emotion? Why a shopkeeper on 15 and hour and not Walmart? Why the advertising industrial complex and not some small 1 man advertising firm?
        amelius 3mo ago
        That's a fallacy like the broken window fallacy. In no way is the consumer helped here, in the end. To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption.
  - pibaker 3mo ago
    If people not liking a thing is enough reason to ban it in a democracy, then how come we still pay tax? And if you want to say "but someone must pay for the public services," the I have some bad news about what pays for your online content consumptions.
    - amelius 3mo ago
      This thread already discussed that point. See the discussion if you're interested in why it is false.
werds 3mo ago
Are the crypto addresses known/recorded anywhere? would be interesting to see on the blockchain how much was stolen this way.
- strictnein 3mo ago
  The code in question is here: https://pastebin.com/raw/mc7psaNF https://pastebin.com/raw/mc7psaNF It appears to be normal Adform code plus two appended chunks at the end. Bitcoin: bc1qmplgt0hcg62jc2guz86wn2sms7tqrsulkkrrls Ethereum: 0xE7983E69df17079ADb0aD7b3458488Cac0dBc573 TRON: TW4AgGnDc2Pk6YAynCtjCKzoKYWPg7nJe (?) Edit: Activity for those addresses: ~$110k bitcoin https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qmplgt0hcg62jc2guz86wn2sms7tqrsulkkrrls https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qmplgt0... ~$55k in ETH https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/eth/0xE7983E69df17079ADb0aD7b3458488Cac0dBc573 https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/eth/0xE7983E69...
  - xkcd-sucks 3mo ago
    It's absolutely nuts that there's so much volume of low effort cryptocurrency transfers that replacing clipboard contents with a different wallet address on people not blocking ads on a specific ad network nets anything at all
  - VoidWhisperer 3mo ago
    The bitcoin one has moved the bulk of the funds (minus like $500) to this address: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/bc1qjekyd0dh8kp3vnvhxqxtla4u2tx8hkwh5sglm7 https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/bc1qjekyd0...
strictnein 3mo ago
Probably should just link to the security researcher's post, since it's far more informative: https://doublepulsar.com/adform-compromised-to-serve-crypto-stealer-via-supply-chain-attack-2f1ec024f33e https://doublepulsar.com/adform-compromised-to-serve-crypto-...
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  The bitcoin wallet swap thing that these malware scripts often push, how effective is it? It just seems so niche, if I'm doing stuff with my crypto wallet, I'm more likely to do it from my phone where I wont be copying and pasting to and from a web browser, maybe a webview if anything? I always double check the characters match up anyway... I am just shocked the level of effort for the most niche hack.
  - harvey9 3mo ago
    Another comment noted over 100,000 USD passing through an associated wallet. I don't know how much work went into this but my hunch is it has paid off pretty good even compared to legit tech work.
    - dspillett 3mo ago
      That is not all necessarily from this hack though. The wallet could be the destination for other scams too.
  - veeti 3mo ago
    It sounds a little implausible at first, but Adform serves like a billion views on European consumer websites. For example, a state gambling monopoly: https://mstdn.social/@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social/117017801586090165 https://mstdn.social/@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social/11701780... The attacker only has to get lucky once
    - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
      Dang. That is wild, it seems like such a blatantly simple exploit, makes sense then.
tamimio 3mo ago
Ad blockers at dns level too, not just browsers. A lot of people don’t even know how to block them, check your parents or kids (or non technical people in general) phone and you will see how they are riddled with ads. I had a dns blocker installed on my parents phones and in around 6hrs it blocked 10k queries from 3 apps only..
- binaryturtle 3mo ago
  I personally also block access by web browsers to non-standard ports (aka not :80 or :443) via an app firewall (Little Snitch here). In this case it would have warned me when the compromised script would have called home to that endpoint on the non-standard port. Gotta tackle such issues at different places all at once for sure. It's like wearing 5 digital condoms at once. Too bad there's still some leakage somewhere for sure. B)
- Cider9986 3mo ago
  DNS level is more secure but less effective because apps and website can serve the essential content on the same domain as the advertisement. It will also become less effective over time. YouTube does this, so you need to use a browser-based ad blocker.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Let them eat cake. Setting up that ad proxy stuff is a bunch of work that many websites won't do.
surcap526 3mo ago
[dead]
tmpsvc2695f5 3mo ago
[flagged]
jimt1234 3mo ago
Browsers should not have access to the clipboard.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  It's you versus Google on that one. Who will win?
  - shevy-java 3mo ago
    Well, it's not just him. It's Google versus Mankind. Mankind will eventually prevail against Evil. Google pissed off too many people now, you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Never in history has good prevailed over evil for more than a short time.
      - anang 3mo ago
        I would argue the opposite is true. We’ve gone from despotic theocratic regimes controlling essentiallt every living human in the world to democratic self determination being one of the most prevalent political theories on the planet. The tolerance for slavery, brutal warfare, institutionalized racism and much more is way lower now than it has been in the past. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
        still_grokking 3mo ago
        LOL The world has always be run by oligarchs, and nothing changed since ten thousands of years. Most people today on this planet are still slaves.
nashashmi 3mo ago
Websites being hacked does not necessitate ad block. It necessitates better browser security. The title here is fallacious. I say this in all fairness as someone who uses adblock extensively, where I don't even like cookies being held by ad companies.
- voxleone 3mo ago
  >>Websites being hacked does not necessitate ad block Their users do.
- worldthruword 3mo ago
  CrowdStrike Outage means we need better Windows.
- helterskelter 3mo ago
  A secure browser that loads an ad doesn't prevent you from being surveilled. Tor mitigates this to a large degree but doesn't entirely eliminate it. The only real solution is to block ads altogether. This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.
  - BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
    Recommended by more than one US Federal three letter agency.
    - helterskelter 3mo ago
      The greatest rec of all was seeing the NSA crying about tor in the Snowden docs. Doesn't get any better than that.
- jiveturkey 3mo ago
  indeed. the post may as well be, javascript must be disabled.
- downrightmike 3mo ago
shevy-java 3mo ago
The sad thing is that we need adblockers in the first place. Granted, even in the 1990s there were ads; I remember blinking banners and what not. But often the underlying website was still fine as such. Fast forward some years. Now if you look at e. g. medium.com but many other websites, you are CONSTANTLY bombarded with pointless pop-ups, slide-ins, and pester-naggers. No I do use ublock origin (it works on thorium by default) so I only get very few ads, but many websites just pursue a strategy to piss off visitors. I do not understand this. If you want anyone to read your content, do not pester them at all. Nowadays when a slide-in appears that sneaks through ublock origin, I don't even let ublock origin block it, I just insta-close that tab. Cookie accept banners fall into the similar category, though some add-ons help with that.
- dabbz 3mo ago
  My least favorite ones are the ones that fit in the rails to the left and right of the content that scroll with you. You can't click anywhere without an accidental ad click. Using any device without ublock reminds me just how much better life is with it...
- datakan 3mo ago
  I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on. Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt. Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt. Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water. I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech. Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
cyanclouds 3mo ago
Finance and Media = annoying ass industries Think of a typical news site with millions of ads flying in as you try to read - they are the causers of this shit ad world Look what happened to YouTube after the news showed up there. Look at the clusterfuck that is housing and banking. Compare how any other vertical is ran by the main players vs Finance and Media - the two most shittily ran industries in the West.
WarmWash 3mo ago
The discussion around Ad blocking is, while definitely a needed discussion, is so rife with confusion, dishonesty and and self-serving ideology that we are going to kill the internet while being absolutely 100% sure that never giving compensation for value did not do any damage or play any part in making the internet suck.
- BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
  I'm willing to go down that road to see where it ends up.
- horsawlarway 3mo ago
  Oh give it a rest. You want to talk about killing a system... look at all the perverse incentives that pop up when companies are allowed to sell user attention instead of decent services and products. If the modern social media internet dies because of ad-blockers... good damn riddance.
  - WarmWash 3mo ago
    The alternative is a class based internet where people with money have access to all the services and people without money get the smallest/worse resources. Everyone takes for granted, or is unaware, that the structure of the current internet is unbelievably progressive (money doesn't matter, attention does, and everyone has the same 24 hours of attention to sell), and yet here we are desperately trying to get away from it. P.S. The 90's internet is dead and isn't coming back. I'm uninterested in engaging if you think bringing back geocities and IRC is a legitimate strategy that the whole of society would happily jump right into. I can already see my mom uninstalling instagram to hop on mIRC.
    - Gander5739 3mo ago
      > everyone has the same 24 hours of attention to sell In general, I agree with what you wrote, but I think advertisers will value "attention" differently based on your purchasing power; not all ad views are equal.
    - 3mo ago
__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
Ads are malware. It's not really surprising when they're found to be bootstrapping other malware.
TZubiri 3mo ago
until the adblockers are hacked
CM30 3mo ago
It's definitely proof that dynamic ads added via an external script library are a massive security risk, that's for sure. Even if the provider doesn't actually get hacked like Adform here, you're still banking on them being able to reject/filter out malware and malicious ads, which plenty of 'credible' networks seem completely unable or unwilling to do. Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with fire, especially nowadays.
- ToucanLoucan 3mo ago
  Why would they? What's your recourse as a consumer if they fuck up your hardware? In the extremely unlikely event you manage to get it in front of a Court, they could point to the 3 other ad networks also present on the same page, and to the wider internet just infested with the fucking things. Odds are incredibly long you could even prove you were infected with whichever virus, and then what do you get? A few years of identity theft protection, a new phone if you're VERY lucky?
- dotancohen 3mo ago
  > Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with fire, especially nowadays. It feels more like having casual unprotected sex. Easy to do in the moment, easy to ignore the risk, painful if "it never happens to me" doesn't come up cats eyes this time. If we called the first programs that self-propagated worms and viruses as per the real world analogy, then I think it's time we rebrand adblockers as "condoms".
  - GuB-42 3mo ago
    With the difference that casual unprotected sex is enjoyable. That ad blockers improve security is a side benefit, most people, me included install ad blockers because ads are annoying. Ad blockers are one of these rare cases where security improve the user experience. Usually, it is the opposite. To go with the condom analogy, most people don't really like condoms, it is the safe thing to do, but they would rather not have it. I don't know anyone who would rather see the ads, but don't because it is unsafe. In fact I don't really understand why not everyone has an ad blocker, from a personal perspective, it is all upside and no downside. But well, I guess I can't complain, if everyone had an ad blocker, websites would just make ad blocking harder, switch to paywalls or something. So thank you non-adblocked people for letting me visit websites for free without ads :)
sciencesama 3mo ago
AI is holy grail of adblocking !!
- BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
  I think there are quite a few things that AI could work very well as a solution for... that it will never be used for because it would threaten industries that profit of the existence of the problem. The parasite that is advertising, especially internet advertising, is one of them.
BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
... proving once again why regulation of internet advertising is needed.

253 points by speckx 3mo ago

I have a feeling everyone with understanding of the situation or even a vague malaise opening a news article and being bombarded with popups that intercept their attention knows why ad blockers are needed, and any perceived "discourse" to the contrary is one sided, from the ad agencies and media platforms that largely and subversively direct the narrative. It's getting harder by the day to tell sentiment apart from narrative.

ksenzee 3mo ago
"You will be annoyed" and "you will be served malware" are two different classes of need. The first is enough to get me running Firefox/uBlock Origin on my own devices. The second is what got me to run it at work.
amelius 3mo ago
Nobody wants ads (*) but somehow they are never banned. Makes you wonder, are we living in a democracy or not? (*) shown at inconvenient moments and tracking the user; yellow pages were fine
- RajT88 3mo ago
  I do not recall ever hearing of an organized effort to ban ads. These days, good luck getting bipartisan agreement, especially with all the dark money in politics being legalized and normalized. That said... The modern internet is built off many free services paid for by people who buy stuff from ads. It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Hosting costs money. I could see a dystopia without ads where a government provides free hosting for citizens. That quickly becomes "thought police" when an authoritarian leading head of state comes in. If we pretend like that will not happen, I think we would have a much more wonderful internet.
  - amelius 3mo ago
    > It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Don't you see the problem with that statement? Ads are profitable, and we are paying for them, indirectly, through buying products and services. Adtech takes a chunk of that profit. Therefore, we pay more than we should!
    - benj111 3mo ago
      So you are paying more than you should for a loaf of bread because your local shop is making a profit? because if you went to the factory you could buy the same loaf for less? Of course you could make the bread yourself for even less because the factory is making a profit, and grow the wheat yourself for even less because the farmer is making a profit. You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because there is no price you 'should' be paying. Further I'm not sure how you imagine this working? The retailer gets to decide prices or not? They get to decide if they advertise or not? The advertiser's have competition? The retailers? Retailers are presumably choosing to advertise because they think it's worth it, thus it is? You are free to choose to buy those products, that will feed into their decision whether and how to advertise.
      - functionmouse 3mo ago
        Are you equating the shopkeeper across the street earning 15 an hour to sell me my loaf of bread to the advertisement industrial complex?
        benj111 3mo ago
        Why are we appealing to emotion? Why a shopkeeper on 15 and hour and not Walmart? Why the advertising industrial complex and not some small 1 man advertising firm?
      - amelius 3mo ago
        That's a fallacy like the broken window fallacy. In no way is the consumer helped here, in the end. To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption.
- pibaker 3mo ago
  If people not liking a thing is enough reason to ban it in a democracy, then how come we still pay tax? And if you want to say "but someone must pay for the public services," the I have some bad news about what pays for your online content consumptions.
  - amelius 3mo ago
    This thread already discussed that point. See the discussion if you're interested in why it is false.

werds 3mo ago

Are the crypto addresses known/recorded anywhere? would be interesting to see on the blockchain how much was stolen this way.

strictnein 3mo ago
The code in question is here: https://pastebin.com/raw/mc7psaNF https://pastebin.com/raw/mc7psaNF It appears to be normal Adform code plus two appended chunks at the end. Bitcoin: bc1qmplgt0hcg62jc2guz86wn2sms7tqrsulkkrrls Ethereum: 0xE7983E69df17079ADb0aD7b3458488Cac0dBc573 TRON: TW4AgGnDc2Pk6YAynCtjCKzoKYWPg7nJe (?) Edit: Activity for those addresses: ~$110k bitcoin https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qmplgt0hcg62jc2guz86wn2sms7tqrsulkkrrls https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qmplgt0... ~$55k in ETH https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/eth/0xE7983E69df17079ADb0aD7b3458488Cac0dBc573 https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/eth/0xE7983E69...
- xkcd-sucks 3mo ago
  It's absolutely nuts that there's so much volume of low effort cryptocurrency transfers that replacing clipboard contents with a different wallet address on people not blocking ads on a specific ad network nets anything at all
- VoidWhisperer 3mo ago
  The bitcoin one has moved the bulk of the funds (minus like $500) to this address: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/bc1qjekyd0dh8kp3vnvhxqxtla4u2tx8hkwh5sglm7 https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/bc1qjekyd0...

strictnein 3mo ago

Probably should just link to the security researcher's post, since it's far more informative: https://doublepulsar.com/adform-compromised-to-serve-crypto-stealer-via-supply-chain-attack-2f1ec024f33e https://doublepulsar.com/adform-compromised-to-serve-crypto-...

giancarlostoro 3mo ago
The bitcoin wallet swap thing that these malware scripts often push, how effective is it? It just seems so niche, if I'm doing stuff with my crypto wallet, I'm more likely to do it from my phone where I wont be copying and pasting to and from a web browser, maybe a webview if anything? I always double check the characters match up anyway... I am just shocked the level of effort for the most niche hack.
- harvey9 3mo ago
  Another comment noted over 100,000 USD passing through an associated wallet. I don't know how much work went into this but my hunch is it has paid off pretty good even compared to legit tech work.
  - dspillett 3mo ago
    That is not all necessarily from this hack though. The wallet could be the destination for other scams too.
- veeti 3mo ago
  It sounds a little implausible at first, but Adform serves like a billion views on European consumer websites. For example, a state gambling monopoly: https://mstdn.social/@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social/117017801586090165 https://mstdn.social/@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social/11701780... The attacker only has to get lucky once
  - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
    Dang. That is wild, it seems like such a blatantly simple exploit, makes sense then.

tamimio 3mo ago

Ad blockers at dns level too, not just browsers. A lot of people don’t even know how to block them, check your parents or kids (or non technical people in general) phone and you will see how they are riddled with ads. I had a dns blocker installed on my parents phones and in around 6hrs it blocked 10k queries from 3 apps only..

binaryturtle 3mo ago
I personally also block access by web browsers to non-standard ports (aka not :80 or :443) via an app firewall (Little Snitch here). In this case it would have warned me when the compromised script would have called home to that endpoint on the non-standard port. Gotta tackle such issues at different places all at once for sure. It's like wearing 5 digital condoms at once. Too bad there's still some leakage somewhere for sure. B)
Cider9986 3mo ago
DNS level is more secure but less effective because apps and website can serve the essential content on the same domain as the advertisement. It will also become less effective over time. YouTube does this, so you need to use a browser-based ad blocker.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Let them eat cake. Setting up that ad proxy stuff is a bunch of work that many websites won't do.

surcap526 3mo ago

[dead]

tmpsvc2695f5 3mo ago

[flagged]

jimt1234 3mo ago

Browsers should not have access to the clipboard.

inigyou 3mo ago
It's you versus Google on that one. Who will win?
- shevy-java 3mo ago
  Well, it's not just him. It's Google versus Mankind. Mankind will eventually prevail against Evil. Google pissed off too many people now, you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Never in history has good prevailed over evil for more than a short time.
    - anang 3mo ago
      I would argue the opposite is true. We’ve gone from despotic theocratic regimes controlling essentiallt every living human in the world to democratic self determination being one of the most prevalent political theories on the planet. The tolerance for slavery, brutal warfare, institutionalized racism and much more is way lower now than it has been in the past. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
      - still_grokking 3mo ago
        LOL The world has always be run by oligarchs, and nothing changed since ten thousands of years. Most people today on this planet are still slaves.

nashashmi 3mo ago

Websites being hacked does not necessitate ad block. It necessitates better browser security. The title here is fallacious. I say this in all fairness as someone who uses adblock extensively, where I don't even like cookies being held by ad companies.

voxleone 3mo ago
>>Websites being hacked does not necessitate ad block Their users do.
worldthruword 3mo ago
CrowdStrike Outage means we need better Windows.
helterskelter 3mo ago
A secure browser that loads an ad doesn't prevent you from being surveilled. Tor mitigates this to a large degree but doesn't entirely eliminate it. The only real solution is to block ads altogether. This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.
- BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
  Recommended by more than one US Federal three letter agency.
  - helterskelter 3mo ago
    The greatest rec of all was seeing the NSA crying about tor in the Snowden docs. Doesn't get any better than that.
jiveturkey 3mo ago
indeed. the post may as well be, javascript must be disabled.
downrightmike 3mo ago

shevy-java 3mo ago

The sad thing is that we need adblockers in the first place. Granted, even in the 1990s there were ads; I remember blinking banners and what not. But often the underlying website was still fine as such. Fast forward some years. Now if you look at e. g. medium.com but many other websites, you are CONSTANTLY bombarded with pointless pop-ups, slide-ins, and pester-naggers. No I do use ublock origin (it works on thorium by default) so I only get very few ads, but many websites just pursue a strategy to piss off visitors. I do not understand this. If you want anyone to read your content, do not pester them at all. Nowadays when a slide-in appears that sneaks through ublock origin, I don't even let ublock origin block it, I just insta-close that tab. Cookie accept banners fall into the similar category, though some add-ons help with that.

dabbz 3mo ago
My least favorite ones are the ones that fit in the rails to the left and right of the content that scroll with you. You can't click anywhere without an accidental ad click. Using any device without ublock reminds me just how much better life is with it...
datakan 3mo ago
I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on. Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt. Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt. Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water. I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech. Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.

cyanclouds 3mo ago

Finance and Media = annoying ass industries Think of a typical news site with millions of ads flying in as you try to read - they are the causers of this shit ad world Look what happened to YouTube after the news showed up there. Look at the clusterfuck that is housing and banking. Compare how any other vertical is ran by the main players vs Finance and Media - the two most shittily ran industries in the West.

WarmWash 3mo ago

The discussion around Ad blocking is, while definitely a needed discussion, is so rife with confusion, dishonesty and and self-serving ideology that we are going to kill the internet while being absolutely 100% sure that never giving compensation for value did not do any damage or play any part in making the internet suck.

BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
I'm willing to go down that road to see where it ends up.
horsawlarway 3mo ago
Oh give it a rest. You want to talk about killing a system... look at all the perverse incentives that pop up when companies are allowed to sell user attention instead of decent services and products. If the modern social media internet dies because of ad-blockers... good damn riddance.
- WarmWash 3mo ago
  The alternative is a class based internet where people with money have access to all the services and people without money get the smallest/worse resources. Everyone takes for granted, or is unaware, that the structure of the current internet is unbelievably progressive (money doesn't matter, attention does, and everyone has the same 24 hours of attention to sell), and yet here we are desperately trying to get away from it. P.S. The 90's internet is dead and isn't coming back. I'm uninterested in engaging if you think bringing back geocities and IRC is a legitimate strategy that the whole of society would happily jump right into. I can already see my mom uninstalling instagram to hop on mIRC.
  - Gander5739 3mo ago
    > everyone has the same 24 hours of attention to sell In general, I agree with what you wrote, but I think advertisers will value "attention" differently based on your purchasing power; not all ad views are equal.
  - 3mo ago

__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago

Ads are malware. It's not really surprising when they're found to be bootstrapping other malware.

TZubiri 3mo ago

until the adblockers are hacked

CM30 3mo ago

It's definitely proof that dynamic ads added via an external script library are a massive security risk, that's for sure. Even if the provider doesn't actually get hacked like Adform here, you're still banking on them being able to reject/filter out malware and malicious ads, which plenty of 'credible' networks seem completely unable or unwilling to do. Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with fire, especially nowadays.

ToucanLoucan 3mo ago
Why would they? What's your recourse as a consumer if they fuck up your hardware? In the extremely unlikely event you manage to get it in front of a Court, they could point to the 3 other ad networks also present on the same page, and to the wider internet just infested with the fucking things. Odds are incredibly long you could even prove you were infected with whichever virus, and then what do you get? A few years of identity theft protection, a new phone if you're VERY lucky?
dotancohen 3mo ago
> Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with fire, especially nowadays. It feels more like having casual unprotected sex. Easy to do in the moment, easy to ignore the risk, painful if "it never happens to me" doesn't come up cats eyes this time. If we called the first programs that self-propagated worms and viruses as per the real world analogy, then I think it's time we rebrand adblockers as "condoms".
- GuB-42 3mo ago
  With the difference that casual unprotected sex is enjoyable. That ad blockers improve security is a side benefit, most people, me included install ad blockers because ads are annoying. Ad blockers are one of these rare cases where security improve the user experience. Usually, it is the opposite. To go with the condom analogy, most people don't really like condoms, it is the safe thing to do, but they would rather not have it. I don't know anyone who would rather see the ads, but don't because it is unsafe. In fact I don't really understand why not everyone has an ad blocker, from a personal perspective, it is all upside and no downside. But well, I guess I can't complain, if everyone had an ad blocker, websites would just make ad blocking harder, switch to paywalls or something. So thank you non-adblocked people for letting me visit websites for free without ads :)

sciencesama 3mo ago

AI is holy grail of adblocking !!

BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
I think there are quite a few things that AI could work very well as a solution for... that it will never be used for because it would threaten industries that profit of the existence of the problem. The parasite that is advertising, especially internet advertising, is one of them.

BLKNSLVR 3mo ago

... proving once again why regulation of internet advertising is needed.