Hacker News Reader

TBH I never see them. I don't know what charmed allow-list I'm on in Google's infra, but 98% of my attempts to repro these reports on Reddit, Mastodon, here, et. al (Incognito mode or no) fail.

This suggests to me that what people are generally seeing is churn, not lack of action (i.e. individual bad actors get taken out but they're up again soon).

View on HN

I work on ads, but not for Google and FWIW, I've only been able to reproduce a few of these malvertising reports. However, I wouldn't be surprised if there were additional targeting parameters on these campaigns. Rather than targeting just anybody searching for VLC, Blender, or Audacity, these malvertisers want to target folks more likely to click a "download now" malvertisement. Maybe only target older users, non-developers, Windows users only, or a number of other facets that probably have a higher rate of installing malware. I have no knowledge if these folks are doing this, but that's what I'd do if I were a scummy advertiser shilling malware. If they can avoid wasting their ad budget on sophisticated users, I'm sure they will.

You searched websites, not windows executable downloads.

There’s malware above things like VLC, Zoom, Firefox, Malwarebytes, Teamviewer, all the time. For the better part of a decade, if not longer.

I literally hit each of those keywords just now and saw nothing of the sort.

So it's probably whack-a-mole problems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com