Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
this.weekinsecurity.com193 points by speckx 6 hours ago
193 points by speckx 6 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-...
The bitcoin wallet swap thing that these malware scripts often push, how effective is it? It just seems so niche, if I'm doing stuff with my crypto wallet, I'm more likely to do it from my phone where I wont be copying and pasting to and from a web browser, maybe a webview if anything? I always double check the characters match up anyway... I am just shocked the level of effort for the most niche hack.
Another comment noted over 100,000 USD passing through an associated wallet. I don't know how much work went into this but my hunch is it has paid off pretty good even compared to legit tech work.
It's definitely proof that dynamic ads added via an external script library are a massive security risk, that's for sure. Even if the provider doesn't actually get hacked like Adform here, you're still banking on them being able to reject/filter out malware and malicious ads, which plenty of 'credible' networks seem completely unable or unwilling to do.
Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with fire, especially nowadays.
Why would they? What's your recourse as a consumer if they fuck up your hardware? In the extremely unlikely event you manage to get it in front of a Court, they could point to the 3 other ad networks also present on the same page, and to the wider internet just infested with the fucking things. Odds are incredibly long you could even prove you were infected with whichever virus, and then what do you get? A few years of identity theft protection, a new phone if you're VERY lucky?
Ads are malware. It's not really surprising when they're found to be bootstrapping other malware.
Are the crypto addresses known/recorded anywhere? would be interesting to see on the blockchain how much was stolen this way.
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 (?)
~$110k bitcoin
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qmplgt0...
~$55k in ETH
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/eth/0xE7983E69...
The bitcoin one has moved the bulk of the funds (minus like $500) to this address: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/bc1qjekyd0...
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
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..
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)
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.
Let them eat cake. Setting up that ad proxy stuff is a bunch of work that many websites won't do.
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.
"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.
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
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.
> 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!
So you are paying more than you should for a loaf of bread because your local shop is making a profit? because if you went to the factory you could buy the same loaf for less? Of course you could make the bread yourself for even less because the factory is making a profit, and grow the wheat yourself for even less because the farmer is making a profit.
You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because there is no price you 'should' be paying. Further I'm not sure how you imagine this working? The retailer gets to decide prices or not? They get to decide if they advertise or not? The advertiser's have competition? The retailers? Retailers are presumably choosing to advertise because they think it's worth it, thus it is? You are free to choose to buy those products, that will feed into their decision whether and how to advertise.
That's a fallacy like the broken window fallacy.
In no way is the consumer helped here, in the end.
To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption.
The point of ads is generally to tempt you to make purchases where the alternative is having nothing. So the comparison I think is more like grocery stores putting junk food right in the checkout to try and have you buy some on impulse?
Are you equating the shopkeeper across the street earning 15 an hour to sell me my loaf of bread to the advertisement industrial complex?
> It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear.
It is hard to imagine a world without horses & carts; many businesses would disappear.
> I do not recall ever hearing of an organized effort to ban ads.
See e.g. https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Measure_5,_Prohibit_Billboard...
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.
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.
> Granted, even in the 1990s there were ads;
the ads in the 90s were served by the same server of the site you were browsing. those ads were images. today's ads are from 3rd party servers running arbitrary JS code that the server of the site you are browsing knows nothing about how it works. ads from the 90s while possibly obnoxious and annoying were not able to be malicious as ads from today.
>>> Nowadays when a slide-in appears that sneaks through ublock origin
Does that really happen ? I don't know what this is
Note: I have Ublock set with no JS permissions by default, so maybe that's why i never see a slide-in menace ?
I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on.
Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.
Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.
Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.
I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.
Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
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...
>If you want anyone to read your content
Reading the content is really not necessary, but the business is predicated on selling ads.
FYI Thorium is updated once every 3 months or so. Not exactly the safest thing in the world.
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.
until the adblockers are hacked
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.
A secure browser that loads an ad doesn't prevent you from being surveilled. Tor mitigates this to a large degree but doesn't entirely eliminate it. The only real solution is to block ads altogether.
This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.
Browsers should not have access to the clipboard.
You can disable it on Firefox by setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false. I haven't had any issues with it.
Someone shared the code in the comments, it uses 'copy' and 'cut' event listeners, so disabling this setting would have prevented the exploit regardless of an adblock.
It's you versus Google on that one. Who will win?
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.
> you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit
A drop in the ocean…
Google is constantly rushing from growth record to growth record in the last years.
Never in history has good prevailed over evil for more than a short time.
I would argue the opposite is true. We’ve gone from despotic theocratic regimes controlling essentiallt every living human in the world to democratic self determination being one of the most prevalent political theories on the planet.
The tolerance for slavery, brutal warfare, institutionalized racism and much more is way lower now than it has been in the past.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
For the last... 30 years? At least the first 20 of the last 30 years, and then it reversed.
LOL
The world has always be run by oligarchs, and nothing changed since ten thousands of years.
Most people today on this planet are still slaves.
Black people were bought and sold in the US just a few hundred years ago.
For years one of the perks of being a soldier was raping and pillaging, now that lands you in prison (depending on the country of course).
The world isn’t some utopia where everyone is treated fairly and there are no oligarchs, but I think it’s hard to argue that the amount of justice is unchanged for all of human history.
What is a labor market?
Do you know that today's soldiers still rape and pillage?
> I think it’s hard to argue that the amount of justice is unchanged for all of human history
I agree.
It got worse.
The inequality between people was never so high in history! Hard fact.
Now some people "earn" more money while they breeze in and out then large amounts of people earn in their whole life.
Also now the slaves have to pay everything themself (like food, shelter, clothes, in some countries even education). Progress!
I just want to understand:
Are you saying that a black person born in South Carolina today has a worse life and with less justice than a black person born into slavery a few hundred years ago?
I don’t think slaves got university educations for free.