Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed | Hacker News Reader

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

this.weekinsecurity.com

253 pointsspeckx103 comments

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.

It sounds a little implausible at first, but Adform serves like a billion views on European consumer websites. For example, a state gambling monopoly: https://mstdn.social/@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social/11701780... The attacker only has to get lucky once

Dang. That is wild, it seems like such a blatantly simple exploit, makes sense then.

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.

That is not all necessarily from this hack though. The wallet could be the destination for other scams too.

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.

   > Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with fire, especially nowadays.

It feels more like having casual unprotected sex. Easy to do in the moment, easy to ignore the risk, painful if "it never happens to me" doesn't come up cats eyes this time.

If we called the first programs that self-propagated worms and viruses as per the real world analogy, then I think it's time we rebrand adblockers as "condoms".

With the difference that casual unprotected sex is enjoyable.

That ad blockers improve security is a side benefit, most people, me included install ad blockers because ads are annoying.

Ad blockers are one of these rare cases where security improve the user experience. Usually, it is the opposite. To go with the condom analogy, most people don't really like condoms, it is the safe thing to do, but they would rather not have it. I don't know anyone who would rather see the ads, but don't because it is unsafe.

In fact I don't really understand why not everyone has an ad blocker, from a personal perspective, it is all upside and no downside. But well, I guess I can't complain, if everyone had an ad blocker, websites would just make ad blocking harder, switch to paywalls or something. So thank you non-adblocked people for letting me visit websites for free without ads :)

The website is the sex. The ads are the chlamydia.

Because there's friction in getting an adblocker. I don't think there are any that work on phones, and Google Chrome crippled theirs on desktop. You have to go far out of your way to have one.

Firefox mobile supports extensions, including uBlock Origin, there are also some ad-blocking Chromium forks. But I agree, on mobile, there is significant friction, for instance, I don't know any of them that can sync with your Google account.

And that's on Android, ad-blocking is even more limited on iOS (ironic considering the business model of Apple vs Google).

Using Firefox (mobile and desktop) is going far out of one's way?

Yes?

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?

Google can't do it, with their resources.

If Google can't do it, no one can. Unless Google don't care enough, but even in that case, why would anyone else bother if the consequences cost less than the monitoring?

As far as I can tell right now, the consequences cost nothing.

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

If people not liking a thing is enough reason to ban it in a democracy, then how come we still pay tax?

And if you want to say "but someone must pay for the public services," the I have some bad news about what pays for your online content consumptions.

This thread already discussed that point. See the discussion if you're interested in why it is false.

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.

I'm not saying the consumer is helped.

I'm saying that all businesses aim to make money, so the fact that this one is doesn't make it morally wrong.

Further you've ascribed some price we 'should' be paying. There's no such thing, and you can't even say that prices would be lower without it. Tobacco companies haven't lowered prices in countries where advertising is banned.

>To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption

A. Surely the consumer would have bought something else? Although gambling advertising is popular...

B. You are now contradicting yourself. You made the claim that advertising was essentially an economic dead weight. Now you're saying it contributes to over consumption. If advertising only puts up prices, that means we can buy less things than we would be able to.

C. This is assuming only bad things are advertised.

In summary. You're trying to make a quasi economic argument against advertising that isn't really correct. I have my own issues with advertising, so I'm not particularly defending it. But that doesn't excuse making up an argument that doesn't make much sense.

The entire problem is that you're looking at it from an economic perspective. From within that framework your reasoning might make sense, but that doesn't mean that with a different starting point it is still valid.

> A + B

No, because you can save money. And when you buy things not on a whim you might actually buy something that has lasting value as opposed to all the tons of cheap fashion people buy.

> C. This is assuming only bad things are advertised.

For good things, go to the yellow pages. I'm not against advertising. Just the forms where it is shoved in my face randomly instead of brought up when I am actively looking for something and want to be informed about products, and of course the forms that have user tracking.

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?

I'm pushing back against the argument that the advertiser make money, ergo we are paying more than we 'should'.

That's how businesses work. The shop makes money when you buy things, so surely the same argument should apply. Except it doesn't, because that is an acceptable business, so the argument isn't really an argument.

The advertiser loses money when you see ads. It makes money when you buy stuff, so it raises prices.

Or the advert increases sales, this paying for itself, and why the advertiser advertises in the first place.

Are you equating the shopkeeper across the street earning 15 an hour to sell me my loaf of bread to the advertisement industrial complex?

Why are we appealing to emotion?

Why a shopkeeper on 15 and hour and not Walmart?

Why the advertising industrial complex and not some small 1 man advertising firm?

> I do not recall ever hearing of an organized effort to ban ads.

See e.g. https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Measure_5,_Prohibit_Billboard...

> 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.

Horses and carts didn't need to be banned to become obsolete.

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

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.

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.

This is internet gold and makes me believe in people again.

I guess we call advertisers hippo butt leaches now? haha, i like that analogy of yours.

>god-i-wish-that-were-me.jpg

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...

>>> 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 ?

>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.

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 (?)

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...

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

The bitcoin one has moved the bulk of the funds (minus like $500) to this address: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/bc1qjekyd0...

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.

dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled=false removes the non-consensual clipboard read access, which is an enhancement but not a strict requisite for attacks of this type. The utility of the other events boils down to mostly convenience: The website can still indirectly observe how you use the clipboard, even when not explicitly notified. The website also remains in control of the CSS properties that can be used to create a meaningful difference between user selection and resulting clipboard content after copying. And, crucially, (blindly) overwriting the clipboard is still permitted.

It prevents event dispatch, upon which this exploit relied. The same could be achieved without listening to clipboard events, in which case the setting would be insufficient. I'm not sure there is a way to fully prevent clipboard manipulation in the browser.

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.

Not with that attitude )

And vice versa

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?

What do you mean “what is a labor market?” That we’ve had an open labor market is fairly modern, and even more modern is the idea of broad workers rights. Would you rather work in a factory now, or 150 years ago? Not everything is always getting better and there are ups and downs, but over a long enough time frame we’re clearly always trending towards better.

I guess I thought it was clear that I understand that soldiers still rape and pillage. But it being illegal anywhere is a fairly modern development.

> 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.

Do they have free university education in South Carolina?

And why only black people?

The implication was that we are worse off now because we have to pay for education, my point is that a black person now may have to pay for education but hundreds of years ago it would have been illegal for them to get any education. To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that we’ve solved all the world’s problems and everything is great, just that I think right does win over wrong over a long enough timespan.

I’m not sure what you mean by “only,” it was just an example.

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.

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.

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.

They're not saying your manual copy/pasting from a browser window onto your clipboard shouldn't be possible; they're saying the browser itself shouldn't allow this functionality to be scriptable internally.

The former is a system event, not a browser one.

This is similar to how on google docs if you try to copy via the edit menu, it pops up to say use Ctrl-C instead.

Honestly, I too am surprised a JavaScript plugin was able to access and alter the system clipboard in the first place too.

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.

Recommended by more than one US Federal three letter agency.

The greatest rec of all was seeing the NSA crying about tor in the Snowden docs. Doesn't get any better than that.

>>Websites being hacked does not necessitate ad block

Their users do.

You are right, adware comes through ad systems regardless. Block everything regardless as well.

CrowdStrike Outage means we need better Windows.

indeed. the post may as well be, javascript must be disabled.

... proving once again why regulation of internet advertising is needed.

until the adblockers are hacked

AI is holy grail of adblocking !!

I think there are quite a few things that AI could work very well as a solution for... that it will never be used for because it would threaten industries that profit of the existence of the problem.

The parasite that is advertising, especially internet advertising, is one of them.

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.

The discussion around Ad blocking is, while definitely a needed discussion, is so rife with confusion, dishonesty and and self-serving ideology that we are going to kill the internet while being absolutely 100% sure that never giving compensation for value did not do any damage or play any part in making the internet suck.

Oh give it a rest.

You want to talk about killing a system... look at all the perverse incentives that pop up when companies are allowed to sell user attention instead of decent services and products.

If the modern social media internet dies because of ad-blockers... good damn riddance.

The alternative is a class based internet where people with money have access to all the services and people without money get the smallest/worse resources.

Everyone takes for granted, or is unaware, that the structure of the current internet is unbelievably progressive (money doesn't matter, attention does, and everyone has the same 24 hours of attention to sell), and yet here we are desperately trying to get away from it.

P.S. The 90's internet is dead and isn't coming back. I'm uninterested in engaging if you think bringing back geocities and IRC is a legitimate strategy that the whole of society would happily jump right into. I can already see my mom uninstalling instagram to hop on mIRC.

> everyone has the same 24 hours of attention to sell

In general, I agree with what you wrote, but I think advertisers will value "attention" differently based on your purchasing power; not all ad views are equal.

The internet is already a class based internet. Why do you think SO many services want you to login, or force you to their mobile apps? They are curating your experience to be as extractive as possible, and if you're not worth much money, they absolutely ditch you, or "pivot" away from that user base.

Attention doesn't matter, attention that generates revenue for corporations does. If you think there's some egalitarian process happening here... you're misunderstanding how the incentives in this system play out.

And no - I don't think the 90s internet is coming back. To be frank, I don't give a flying fuck about your mom and whether she can use mIRC or not (or my mother, for that matter). I care about my kids, and the experiences they'll have with technology.

I think dropping my children into this ad-riddled, dopamine hijacking, carefully crafted to be exploitative technological environment is just a damn irresponsible thing to be doing. And if that means ad-blockers as a side effect... great.

Then I'll vote to burn that damn thing down every chance that's presented. I don't think people should be served up addictive experiences through always present devices to sell them shit they don't need with funding from ads. Full fucking stop. What a fucking dystopia you present as some progressive space. Blech... It's only progressive in the sense that everyone gets the same gruel of meaningless, unfulfilling content.

> The only way we can have welfare is to siphon billions into tech monopolies by psychologically manipulating everyone into spending on crap they don't need. This is totally good for those not as well off.

Ok, buddy.

… or play any part in making the internet suck.

Right, it’s the ad-blocking that’s making the internet suck. You’re going to hurt your lower back carrying that much water.

I'm willing to go down that road to see where it ends up.

There is no discussion. My computer, my rules: no harassment and psychological manipulation allowed no matter how much your business model relies on it.

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