Malware on Boing boing main site?

I just got that too on mobile (opera browser) - am on android, and certainly have Play Protect installed and enabled, seems pretty sketch - whatever it is.

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Iā€™m getting the asshile play ad, too. Not good enough. 0/10. Must try harder.

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And theres nowhere to click to close the darn thing. I had to shut off scripting to make it go away.

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I blocked it with uBlock Origin - I wondered if it would break the actual page with the article, but surprise surprise, it didnā€™t.

Weā€™re trying to nuke that bad ad.

If you happen to get it yourself and would like to help, head over to https://freestar.com/bad-ads/ and report it, please!

These ads are often narrowly targeted thanks to the world of programmatic advertising, so tracking down the offending advertiser is often extremely difficult.

We appreciate that, but as weā€™ve said before, the most successful patreon website campaign ever would not be enough to fund Boing Boing. We hear you and are always looking for better options!

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I actually tried, but their site gives an error when I try to submit!


I suppose that I could disable components of my adblocker but isnā€™t that what a malicious site would want me to do?

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Well, in this case you went directly to the URL by link, so as long as you donā€™t think Iā€™m a malicious bot, you are probably ok :wink:

The reason we use that form is it grabs all the info from your browser that an ad would, including cookies and the like, so this allows our advertising partner to track what ads you were actually shown and have a much better change of catching the bad one as a result.

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Thatā€™s not what Iā€™ve heard!

Got the ā€œdevice not saveā€ and the ā€œinstall Adobe Flashā€ thingies yesterday using Brave in desktop mode on a Android tablet.

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If you use an adblocker just add a rule for it - I used the element picker in uBlock Origin to block the ad, and after that it showed the article just fine. On my Android phone I use Blokada to block ads globally so I donā€™t see any of these. (Blokada is a godsend - sure itā€™s somewhat of a battery drain, but at least I donā€™t have to worry about ads.)

That said, this is pretty shitty. At this point I stopped recommending BoingBoing to people.

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Itā€™s been a day. Still no warning post on the main site that Boing Boing readers were exposed to multiple malware attacks, nor any warnings that BB visitors should run AV/Malware scans. BB doesnā€™t really have a good position to criticize others, such as Virgin Mobile or Equifax, for their malware problems if BB doesnā€™t publicly address its own on its main page.

Etc.

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No healthy backends? Ouch, I just had a colonoscopy on Friday!

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Guru ā€œMediationā€? Someone needs to get hip to their obscure 30-year-old memes.

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Update:

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Well, fuck.

First kneejerk: How about assuming my account details are now owned by someone not BB staff and nuking my account?

The BBS and the main BB site are two different sites and the accounts here only work here. The BBS/Discourse site was fine.

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Management says the Discourse servers were not affected. Only the main CMS, hence why the attack was only seen on the BB main page and not here on the BBS. But itā€™s hard to prove a negative, so who knows.

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Never install anything that you didnā€™t go looking for yourself.

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And even then, only sometimes.

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