Well, I’m new here so I can only relay the message. I personally have never experienced what has been described so previously I didn’t participate in those discussions. Now that my status has changed slightly, I want to make an effort to address issues as best I can. The best way I can is to encourage description of the circumstances and relay the issues to the folks who are able to address them (not me).
To be fair it isn’t SDMB distributing the malware, it’s the ads. And that’s true of ads all over the internet. This board does pretty well in responding to the complaints of posters and attempting to track down the particular offending ad. But it’s an ongoing battle: the only way to be really sure that none of the ads have malware is to not have any ads at all and clearly that’s just not a viable option at present.
The situation with the malware has escalated to the point where I can no longer use this site. I can open one internal screen upon entering this site (thus the ability to make this post), but any attempts to view additional pages results in the malware hijack.
Hopefully this can get corrected soon as I will miss my daily visits.
Side note: Auto correct believes I really intended to type “mallard” rather than malware, which made for a small chuckle when proofreading.
Nonsense. You just use a ad provider that doesn’t send malware containing ads, one that check first. There are many such.
Now, sure, I guess you can say that doesnt make you 100% sure, but it’s better than a sketchy ad provider that aids and abets malware providers.
You may think it a simple matter. It isn’t. Here’s a recent article from a senior security researcher with Malwarebytes. It shows just how difficult it can be for even the experts to detect malware in an ad.
I repeat, all ad providers are prey to this. None can guarantee no infected ads.
None can guarantee, sure. But some actively aid and abet, others dont care and make no effort and others take steps to prevent.
Obviously, you need to get a ad provider that at least* tries. *
I was having problems with this for a while and my Android constantly restarting. I took the SD card out of its slot and the problems went away.
Does the SDMB use Google to provide all its ads or is there another ad provider? Without knowing this we can’t really judge if the provider(s) has a poor reputation for vetting its ads. I do have to concede that the volume of complaints here over the years is worrisome. As a non-member I wouldn’t dream of coming here without adequate safeguards.
“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” (Goldfinger novel.)
If it keeps happening over and over with no real change in policies, this is on TPTB.
The Dope is near the bottom of the barrel in poor choice of advertisers. Slate and such doesn’t have anywhere near this level of problems.
You make a bunch of horrible choices, you can’t blame others for the results.
The SDMB is the only site where I have this issue when on Android platforms. I try to avoid stopping Java to kill the ads because it’s a PITA and I want to support the site by allowing ads to exist. The malware frequency has increased greatly in the last three days, however and I pretty much need to make the problem stop.
Also read the new entries in the sticky at the top of this page about the phone virus hijack on Android phones.
It was rampant last night but seems to be better now. Maybe Rip Van IT guy woke up.
As an update, our ad folks have isolated some issues and are working on a resolution. Thank you for the descriptions of what is happening, especially the screen caps. These are helpful in replicating the issues so they can be resolved.
Mine is still doing it. Both on my Kindle and my phone.
One would think ad guys who worked for a reputable company would check out the shit they serve before they serve it. Maybe it’s time to move up the ladder to an ad provider that actually understands prevention is preferable to curing.
Got it twice in rapid succession. On the mafia thread and this one.
Same as the others. The Avira ad hijacks my browser about 30% of the time per page load from my phone (Chrome browser). I can maybe look at two or three threads at most before I get hijacked, have to close the tab out and come back fresh. Happened as recently as an hour ago. Very annoying.
Yes, it is getting worse, not better.
This is getting out of control. Like the others I’m only getting the redirects while accessing sdmb sites. It’s to the point where I can’t even read certain threads at all because every time I access it I’m getting the redirects. The Dope used to be my favorite site, but I’m about to abandon ship altogether if I can’t even read without obnoxious pop-ups and fear of malware.
Well, it appears that the ‘working on a resolution’ means 'make it worse.
Now on both of my android phones, as soon as I go to the message board the original window closes and all I get is the scary "YOUR PHONE IS INFECTED!!?!?!?!!! DOWNLOAD THIS NOW’ page that tries to download a file. This is the only site that I usually go to that is exhibiting this behavior.
Look, it is simple. Stop the ads until you know that they are fixed. It isn’t hard. There are processes for things like this. It is called ‘testing’. Just about everyone does it.
Then, once you know that you aren’t going to infect your users with malware, you turn the ads back on.
Slee
And here is a hint. For me, the hijack doesn’t happen on the main page, and it doesn’t happen on the Threads in Forum page. It only happens when I am actually reading a thread. Coincidentally, these are also the pages that have the multiple links at the bottom of the page that say “Sponsored links by Taboola”.
Google “Sponsored links by Taboola” and there are a lot of results that just might make someone think that Taboola may somehow be related to this fuckery.