What's going on with malicious mobile adverts?

[watercooled]

Lately on a few sites, notably Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, I keep getting malicious redirect adverts like this:


They vary, sometimes displaying ISP (often incorrectly) and phone manufacturer taken from headers no doubt.

They're frequently accompanied by JS alerts and activating vibration on the phone. This is on nearly every visit to Anandtech lately, to the point it's impossible to actually read any articles without an ad blocker.

AFAIK it's nothing on my side - it's only in the browser, they're fairly straightforward to close and only affect a few specific sites. I've also tried clearing data for Chrome to no avail. Thankfully Hexus seems OK at the moment. As I don't have a Twitter account, nor an account on AAT forums, I had a look for email contact details and the best I could find was something at Purch so I let them know a few weeks ago, but nothing has changed.

Some advertising networks really need to get their house in order - complaining about ad blockers in one breath, but allowing adverts which utterly break your website in another!

[Lucio]

It's the Disquiss (sic??) network, it's become fairly popular on a lot of sites and is as vulnerable as heck to being hijacked by malicious ads.

[watercooled]

Don't Anandtech use their own comments system though?

[MLyons]

The fact it says CloudFlare inc is interesting as this indicates they are grabbing something from the server - Not 100% sure on how cloudflare works atm though. Any idea if this happens on iOS?

[watercooled]

I've no idea, only use Android on mobile at the moment. I've not had it happen with Hexus though.

Something else interesting is the time in the popup doesn't match the actual time, not even the minutes are the same. It could just be fixed text though.

[Firejack]

I've installed https://pi-hole.net/ on my Ubuntu box. Its a network ad blocker. Simply edit your DHCP server settings with the IP of Pi-Hole for your DNS servers. Boom, no more ads.

I've always been a supporter of online advertising until this year. I had some extremely offensive ads on Eurogamer, 2 infected ads on 2 different machines and battery sucking ads on my Android tablet.

With Pi-Hole, websites now load faster, I have better battery life and I can happily browse without all the click-bait nonsense at the bottom of every page.

There is a really nice and simply web interface to manage Pi-Hole. You can easily whitelist ads on your favourite sites or blacklist sites you want to block all together.

Overall it was well worth the 30-40 minutes to setup.

[MLyons]

I've installed https://pi-hole.net/ on my Ubuntu box. Its a network ad blocker. Simply edit your DHCP server settings with the IP of Pi-Hole for your DNS servers. Boom, no more ads.

I've always been a supporter of online advertising until this year. I had some extremely offensive ads on Eurogamer, 2 infected ads on 2 different machines and battery sucking ads on my Android tablet.

With Pi-Hole, websites now load faster, I have better battery life and I can happily browse without all the click-bait nonsense at the bottom of every page.

There is a really nice and simply web interface to manage Pi-Hole. You can easily whitelist ads on your favourite sites or blacklist sites you want to block all together.

Overall it was well worth the 30-40 minutes to setup.

Wasn't aware you could do this with Pi-Hole. Might have to look into it.

[Dashers]

*duplicate*

[Dashers]

To be fair, I block a very small handful of domains on my DNS server and that cuts out the vast majority of advertising.

For malware, I also have a script to download zone files nightly from malwaredomains.com - there's a lot in that.

[watercooled]

I'm trying to avoid completely blocking ads as I understand it's how a lot of companies actually make money, but companies who don't care about what adverts they're serving are really shooting themselves in the foot as I won't keep checking if they've sorted the problem on a regular basis and I imagine most people are the same - once they get blocked, they'll stay that way for a while.

FWIW I don't think the majority of adverts are actively trying to download malware, rather they're just nonsense browser hijackers that try to avoid you closing them. Also I think browsers have a lot to answer for there - it should not be possible for any website to forcibly steal focus and prevent closing, even the 'prevent additional dialogues' thing doesn't always work properly as I think they've worked around it by pretending the popups are from different origins or something.

And you really shouldn't need to install third-party ad blockers to a) avoid wasting the majority of your data allowance on bloaded adverts and b) to avoid malicious nonsense.

[Dashers]

I've got no problem with simple textual adverts that don't take up bandwidth or masses of processing power. e.g. Google's search links. But yeah, big graphics that suck your bandwidth, javascript bloat that kills your browser, pop ups and redirects. Nope. Not gonna happen.

There's a beginning of a trend of paywalls if you block adverts. And you know what, that's fine too, there is very little on the Internet that I really need to get to on one specific site. I simply won't use those sites.

[watercooled]

That's pretty much my attitude TBH - sites having the cheek to ask for payment because you're blocking their bloated/malicious adverts? Nope!

[watercooled]

While we're on the subject - can anyone recommend Android browsers with support for ad blocking? I'm currently running Chrome for general use as it's fast and fluid, and Firefox for sites in the sin bin, but scrolling is a bit janky. What's everyone else using?

[MLyons]

While we're on the subject - can anyone recommend Android browsers with support for ad blocking? I'm currently running Chrome for general use as it's fast and fluid, and Firefox for sites in the sin bin, but scrolling is a bit janky. What's everyone else using?

With support for the ability to whitelist Hexus of course... Is it pop ups or all ads you want to get rid of on mobile?

[watercooled]

As Hexus has no such problems* I've just kept using that on Chrome (which has no ad blocker), it's only as a second browser for otherwise broken websites.

Unfortunately blocking popups doesn't help - they're disabled in Chrome but redirects happen nonetheless, sometimes after waiting for the banner ad to cycle around to one of the malicious adverts. Until browsers fix this exploit in their core (e.g. by disallowing infinite JS popups within one tab or redirects once a page has finished loading), there's no alternative to using an ad blocker that I'm aware of.

*And from what I've seen, when any advert problems are reported, they're taken seriously and acted on by staff. The same can't be said for many other sites sadly.

[Dashers]

Opera does advert blocking through their proxy system.