YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo! caught in malvertising mess Cisco has spotted some big names serving up malicious advertising: YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo! among them. A Borg blogger, Armin Pelkmann, with fellow-authors Shaun Hurley and David McDaniel, writes that what the company calls the “Kyle and Stan” malware campaign began in May, and uses redirects to try and trick users into …
all browsers should ship with AdBlock Plus (with non-intrusive advertising also disabled) and NoScript, or equivalents thereof, enabled by default.
It is humiliating for our species that the world's greatest minds are being wasted on how to make internet users clock more ads, and this is the consequence.
"The attackers check the user agent to work out whether a target is running a Windows or a Mac machine, and redirect them accordingly."
Damn, I regret switching to Linux now. Would it help if I disabled AdBlock and Request Policy and NoScript and FlashBlock?
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"All of the more than 700 attack domains the researchers have identified are hosted on Amazon, ..."
Well, then, shouldn't be too hard to identify the bad guys, really? Hello, Amazon, would you like to get that mud off your face? Oh, the easy money thing, huh...
Nothing like the spectacle of the ad pimps pissing on their own shoes and giving what amounts to a big thumbs up to adblockers while they're at it. Just to liven things up a bit, it would be nice to see some fines being levelled at those networks that allow this to happen, at least to the level of the cost of the damage done. Because surely its long, long overdue for the ad networks to clean their act up and start checking more thoroughly - one unwanted product at a time is bad enough.
Simpler to a point, but I'd guess I see even fewer ads today simply because the blocking is so effective. Its always a bit of a shocker using someone elses browser and being reminded of what life out there is actually like.
A bit less dreadful today, but the real full-fat ad horror experience of choice to test a browser on used to the the hindustantimes - a decade ago you could reduce the data a page would pull by 80 percent by giving the ads the flick.
I'm curious to know what percentage of El Reg's revenues are provided by Ads? They always amuse me by pitching vendor X in the midst of an article that describes their latest mishap.
I tend to see them (Ads) as a price I have to pay for free content. I suppose I could buy loads of Cash and Carrion t-shirts instead...
If ElReg offered a (decent priced) ad-free subscription, i'd seriously consider it. The auto-play loud videos are getting to me, but I also feel I "owe" the site as a whole some eyeball time.
Alas, I am old enough to remember when Cable TV was touted as Ad-free, high-quality programming for pennies a day, and we all know how that turned out: "Dear Mike16, we know that you value our content and do not mind at all the 90% of your bandwidth dedicated to bringing you important offers, but you may be interested in our Platinum Reader subscription that will serve only the most profitable^Wcrucial notices, for the extremely reasonable price of $400/month"
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