Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

What changed

“The problem we have right now is that for years we’ve had almost no one policing these ads.txt and app-ads.txt files.” The Opera Web browser remains quite popular, and probably many users are unaware that since 2016 it has been majority owned and controlled by the Chinese company Kunlun Tech (the operational headquarters of Opera remain in Oslo, Norway).

“A lot of serious organizations are starting to understand that if we’re not breaking down this ad data, we’re not going to know who’s targeting government people with zero-click payloads on an almost daily basis,” he said.

“You may see the malicious zero-click redirection, but without the supply chain object — which is only served server side — you won’t know who targeted your people with malware and won’t have a way to try and prevent it properly.

Once you’ve set it up properly and changed your router’s network settings to use the Pi-hole’s DNS sinkhole and DHCP servers, it should prevent ads from displaying on any devices connected to that network.

Many websites now push users to install a mobile app, supposedly in order to more fully access and enjoy the site’s services and content.

Who is affected

military news websites — including armytimes.com , airforcetimes.com , defensenews.com , navytimes.com , marinecorpstimes.com and federaltimes.com — shows they all allow Between Digital to serve ads and track users, as well as two entities in the UAE and another in the ownership secrecy haven of Panama.

For example, last month KrebsOnSecurity wrote about researchers from Bitsight who found that an extremely popular line of TV streaming sticks called H96 quietly rent out each user’s Internet connection to strangers.

Bitsight also discovered that when these devices aren’t being used to stream pirated video content, they are spoofing themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated slop websites .

This practice, he said, makes it easier for dodgy adtech firms to avoid accountability and continue victimizing others.

“The way the adtech industry works, someone will write a report about ad fraud and only share it with their own clients and they won’t make it public,” Edwards said.

So if you’re trying to navigate who is suspicious, that’s usually tough to do because there are a lot of adtech companies removing things all at once.” Malvertising, the term given to the practice of inserting malicious ads that foist malware or redirect visitors to phishing pages, remains an all-too-frequent occurrence in the modern adtech industry.

Why this matters

“They’re just signing up the lowest quality partners, and it essentially becomes a greased rail to target the users of those sites with malicious ads.

Most malvertising attacks don’t happen on espn.com or huffpost.com, but rather [on] some lower quality content farm and someone just went there because it came up in a search.” Edwards said the AI slop websites are populated with machine-generated blog posts and images, and cover a wide array of themes from home improvement and decorating to food recipes, hunting, cars and consumer technology.

But if we can encourage the adtech industry to expose that SCO, it will get easier to find the culprit behind any one bad ad.” DecryptAds also offers an application programming interface (API) that allows researchers to automate queries and integrate the site’s functionality into popular AI platforms.

This approach is broadly endorsed by security experts because it also makes it more difficult for adtech firms and data brokers to build detailed profiles on you and track your movements around the web and in the real world.

More technically inclined/adventuresome readers should strongly consider a hardware approach to blocking ads at the local network level, because that is easily the cheapest, most secure and scalable way to do it.

But in my experience, they’re not doing this because the user experience is somehow way better on the app (as LinkedIn tries to convince us non-app users several times a week via email).

What defenders should do now

The only sane reaction to the examples described above is to block all online ads outright.

However, script blockers like NoScript may not be suitable for average users who don’t enjoy constantly having to referee which scripts should be allowed to load so that each site displays properly.

Bear in mind that ad blockers often do little to block ads and/or tracking that occurs from within mobile apps that users have chosen to install on their devices.

What remains unknown

The available reporting does not establish whether the issue is being actively exploited in the wild.

The available reporting does not establish who is behind the activity, if an attacker is involved.