German surfers blitzed by widespread malvertising campaign German surfers are under attack from multiple directions this week because of a widespread malvertising campaign. Users of eBay.de and subscribers of ISP T-Online.de were confronted with tainted ads after cybercrooks succeeded in pushing malicious traffic through rogue systems. The attacks began after hackers circumvented …
To all of the websites that try to chastise me for running ad-blocking software: THIS is why I run it.
The auto-play video ads and the flashy-thing banners are annoying, of course, and I don't miss them; but my main reason for ad blocking is security.
I have not had a virus, Trojan, spyware, or PUP on any of my computers since I installed AdBlock Plus. None, zero, zilch.
Like all IT pros, I'm constantly asked for help by friends whose machines are crippled by this kind of nonsense. After cleaning up the mess, I install ABP on their machine and they never have a problem again.
If publishers want people to stop blocking ads, they have to take responsibility for everything that gets published under their name. As long as they allow ads that are pumped out by unmanaged, automated CDNs that can be exploited by "malvertisers," then ad blocking will continue to grow.
VMWare used to offer a VM with Firefox installed a number of years back. Seems like a pretty good idea since for most people, the web browser is going to be the main point of entry for nasties. The link to follow seems to be this one, though it points to an external site (http://browser.shell.tor.hu/) that I'd never heard of before.
Still, most readers here probably don't need for someone else to package up things for them. It's easy to install a minimal OS and browser in a free VM systems (eg, VirtualBox) or do the same with Docker. Most malware won't be aware that it's running in a virtualised environment, and even if it is, it probably won't have any exploits to allow it to escape.
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