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

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sspeckx about 3 hours ago 32 commentsRead Article on this.weekinsecurity.com

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Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

strictnein•about 2 hours 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-...

werds•about 2 hours ago

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

strictnein•about 2 hours ago

The code in question is here: 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/bc1qmplgt0...

~$55k in ETH

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/eth/0xE7983E69...

xkcd-sucks•28 minutes 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

shevy-java•44 minutes 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•34 minutes 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...

cyanclouds•38 minutes 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.

jimt1234•about 1 hour ago

Browsers should not have access to the clipboard.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

It's you versus Google on that one. Who will win?

shevy-java•42 minutes 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.

inigyou•17 minutes ago

Never in history has good prevailed over evil for more than a short time.

schaefer•10 minutes ago

What?

If copy and paste is disabled in my default browser that would be something like 80% of my total of my total use cases for the clipboard in the first place.

tgv•24 minutes ago

Nor USB devices, nor the screen size, nor ... They can access way too many parts of the OS. But almost nobody cares, as long as they have their shiny feeds and videos.

shevy-java•43 minutes ago

That depends. For my local use I want to access everything.

For external situations I agree. No clue why browsers started to sniff after people. I blame Google for that.

tamimio•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

Let them eat cake. Setting up that ad proxy stuff is a bunch of work that many websites won't do.

nashashmi•about 1 hour 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•26 minutes ago

>>Websites being hacked does not necessitate ad block

Their users do.

worldthruword•23 minutes ago

CrowdStrike Outage means we need better Windows.

functionmouse•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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!

functionmouse•16 minutes ago

My town banned billboards entirely. It's been a resounding success.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

I don't care. It was better before there were ads. It will be better after there are ads. Most actual useful content isn't monetised, and most monetised content is slop. There is a spectrum between the two endpoints, of course.