Again, I reiterate, because this is important! Ad blocking? Yeah I already looked at this before, but what does Wikipedia have to say about this now?
20180904/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking
20180904/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adblocking_growth_according_to_pagefair.svg
Oh, now this is interesting.
In a high-profile case, malware was distributed through advertisements provided to YouTube by a malicious customer of Google’s Doubleclick.[22][23] In August 2015, a 0-day exploit in the Firefox browser was discovered in an advertisement on a website.[24] When Forbes required users to disable ad blocking before viewing their website, those users were immediately served with pop-under malware.[25]
Reference source article is this one.
20180904/https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say-block-that-malware/
But now, this is a really interesting quote from that article.
It’s crazy to consider what a perfect marriage this is, between the advertisers and the criminals pushing the exploit kits. They have a lot in common.
Both try to trick us into giving them something we don’t want to. We’ve recently learned that both entities surveil and track us beyond what we’re OK with. And both are hard to get rid of. You know, like those gross toenail and skin condition ad-banners found at the bottom of every cheapo blog you’ve ever seen, forever burned into the “can’t unsee” section of your brain.
It actually makes business sense to think about malware attacks like an advertiser. You want to deliver your infection to, and scrape those dollars from, every little reader out there. You need a targeted delivery system, with the widest distribution, and as many clueless middlemen as possible.
It’s easy to want to blame Reader’s Digest, or Yahoo, or Forbes, or Daily Mail, or any of these sites for screwing viewers by serving them malicious ads and not telling them, or not helping them with the cleanup afterward. And it’s a hell of a lot easier when they’ve compelled us to turn off our ad blockers to simply see what brought us to their site.
But the problem is coming through them, from the ad networks themselves. The same ones, it should be mentioned, who control the Faustian bargains made by bartering and selling our information.
What should the websites do? The ad networks clearly don’t have a handle on this at all, giving us one more reason to use ad blockers. They’re practically the most popular malware delivery systems on Earth, and they’re making the websites they do business with into the same poisonous monster. I don’t even want to think about what it all means for the security practices of the ad companies handling our tracking data or the sites we visit hosting these pathogens.
So, to my friend on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list – a malware researcher, which I’ll concede is actually ironic – I’m sorry I won’t be seeing your time in that particular spotlight. What we need is a word for the fact that ad blockers have become our first line of defense against a malware epidemic. Especially during a time when the sites we visit are begging, pleading, demanding and practically tricking us into turning off Ad Block Plus.
So, yes. Moral of the story, for the time being, use ad blockers.