So, it’s definitely possible, especially with human review and static ads. No code. It might not be possible at scale. To me, that’s just not an excuse. If you can’t do something safely at scale, then you shouldn’t. If that means generalized online ads can’t exist then… so be it.
Online ads are definitely still possible. For example, im sure Disney reviews and approves all ads that run on Disney plus. So just do that, and if you can’t do that for e.g. YouTube then dont.
Which you can absolutely do, when you are Disney (read, agencies fight to run a campaign with you). When you are, let's say, TechCrunch, the situation changes - you can still strike some deals but a lot of your demand is not the same grade.
That's the first point. Now, who should be responsible for getting the ads? The website? That will absolutely kill the monetization model and it is simply unrealistic. Which means, that responsibility now should be pinned on someone else. Who would that be? My point being that no one there has an inherent lawful obligation to provide such vetting, which would be a) costly and b) only applicable to one player (out of many).
And then we get to bad actors. If I were a really motivated bad actor as early as in 2005, I was serving different creatives and different landing pages to different audiences - a perfectly well-behaved ones to Google's crawlers (again, Google does A LOT to fight malware), a questionable quality clicky ones to general audiences and maybe malware-ridden ones to specifically targeted audiences. And you would not be able to catch me in real time - only after the fact, once the campaign was run and someone looked at the evidence (assuming it was collected, which it isn't normally)
I'm assuming that means ad impressions and not unique ads.
And again, we are talking about logical creative (the actual visible part). Click URLs and such will definitely be different.
Perhaps the actual problem then are these monolith platforms that have done such a good job "eating the world" that they can no longer properly function.
I'm critically uninterested in the fictions of the business idiot class. I'm sure for many purposes it's important for all the papers to have the proper LLC's on them. For the purpose of burning it to the ground though, it's not overly important.
There is no universe in which 'gosh it's just too hard' is the correct answer.
Their argument was often that the complexities and volume of data, messages, devices just made it impossible for them to help law enforcement even when justified. Almost as if they were apologetic -- they simply cannot help!
But I was in a room once with a very senior police official, prosecutor and several telco reps when the simple question was asked: why is it not impossible then also to do billing?
Every time the conversation moved away from this point, it was forced to return by the non telco members: they knew it would cost money for the telco to help. And any argument against that was simply foregoing that cost at the expense of the safety or well-being of the public, and was unacceptable.
You may feel (in my example) their are many arguments against state surveillance, but the core truth is that all of these ad providers could indeed have systems that at least attempt to prevent this kind of activity -- it would just reduce profits to do so.
Lastly on the zero click lack of detail: it's kind of irrelevant. The exploit might be complicated, but the vector is clear -- the ad network.
If a website serves me malware, the website's owner should be liable to me. They may then be able to sue someone else, in turn. But I chose to interact with them and then they chose to outsource stuff to crooks.
This would be complicated to implement. But it's absolutely doable.
Then there are all kinds of fun scenarios - from drive-by malware to landing page malware to malware served after clicking an ad ON A LANDING PAGE. Who would assume responsibility for those?
Bottom line, this is not much different from "regular" crime. It happens. Governments employ police and various deterrents to reduce it. But it doesn't relieve you, the citizen, of responsibility to be mindful and exercise situational awareness.
Why? An insurance product wouldn't wipe out ad revenues.
> this is not much different from "regular" crime. It happens
Why do you think parking lots have signs that say they aren't responsible for goods stolen out of cars parked there? Because that liability, by default, exists. And if a parking lot is a robbery hotspot, and the owners don't bother putting up cameras or whatnot, they'll absolutely start facing lawsuits and investigations.
> it doesn't relieve you, the citizen, of responsibility to be mindful and exercise situational awareness
Nobody argued as much. That doesn't mean we give negligent actors monetizing malware a free pass.
As for the ad provider, it is trivial to not deliver criminal payloads if your business starts from the assumption that doing so is costly instead of something you can foist on society for your own benefit.
My main concern is supply chain attacks. I'm afraid, the frequency and sophistication of such attacks will only increase, thanks to really powerful LLMs. From there - to running keyloggers and stealing your bank credentials etc.
When I worked at an adtech company almost ten years ago, this sort of shit was the exact concern of me and my colleagues. We've had time to do better but guess we're just fucked.
It would break the long tail of the ad ecosystem, but a bunch of people think the tradeoff is fine.
Given how much of online advertising is now in walled gardens rather than display ads, I think this shows this is more doable than the people who are part of the open ecosystem want it to be.
It’s a choice, and on the other side of that choice is profit.
I also have a choice. I choose to filter out as many ads I can. That is my vetting process.
How do you even plan to explain it to your grand-children?
The article does say "Both samples use a COM hijack for persistence, though make use of different DLLs." So does this only affect Windows machines? I didn't have time to read the linked 2021 report on Candiru, so maybe more details are there, but for such a detailed write up it would be helpful if the article was more explicit about which browser vulnerability was exploited. The step-by-step info graphic in the article literally skips over how the infection actually occurs.
It read to me like it was assumed to be using OS/browser/application-level exploits to get further access to target devices. I suspect the CitizenLab report is light on details in particular because they don't actually know them:
> In most cases, the user who sees the ad is not selected for targeting, and the server will not return any JavaScript to be executed.
> A large number of ads placed by Discover-Tech contain a script tag pointing back to what the company refers to as a “NOAS server” (also called a “getAd server”). This tag causes the ad, when rendered, to connect back to Discover-Tech, submit advertising identifiers for the user (either a cookie ID or a mobile ad ID), and automatically execute any JavaScript code returned. The NOAS server decides, apparently based on a combination of the source IP address and the advertising identifiers, whether the target is eligible to receive any JavaScript. If so, then code is returned. If not, a 0-byte response is returned. The NOAS server is a key part of Discover-Tech’s strategy, allowing Discover-Tech to avoid directly sharing malicious code, or even pointers to malicious code, with the companies who serve and display the ads.
To paraphrase Churchill, it is a terrible model but others are worse.
They're pointing out the article lacks substance implied by its title, and essentially that it would be nice to see the actual bad actors being prosecuted instead of the middleman. Both positive things to hear for me? Who cares if they work for the industry.
(The former thing is positive because it saves me time reading the article for information that won't be there.)
No, it doesn't. Your company is too much of a cheap fuck to do it and would rather offload that cost on society, no matter how bad the effects of it is.
>There is no such thing as "ad provider."
Only when it's to your advantage, because you're very happy to refer to yourself as an ad provider in every single marketing piece.
>AdTech engineer here (some 13 years in the industry)
You've made the world miserable for the past 13 years and have the gall to come over and pretend you're a poor innocent little thing who can't do nothing UwU there's just too much how could we be held responsible.