Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'ransomware' malvertising

Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by tallanvor on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @10:05AM (#11297367)

Yes. It's funny how more and more sites act like it's morally wrong to block ads, but obviously aren't willing to do the work to protect their visitors from this sort of thing.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by JorgeGT on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @10:56AM (#11297803)

They could deal with advertisers themselves and manually approve and display text/image ads from their own domain (as it was done in printed newspapers), but isn't it easier to just leave a div+javascript and have the right of arbitrary code execution in a chunk of your page get auctioned off to the highest bidder by several shady ad network?

Just go to www.bbc.com and look at what domains your ad-blocker denies: edigitalsurvey.com, chartbeat.com, googletagservices.com, scorecardresearch.com, effectivemeasure.net, iperceptions.com, krxd.net, optimizely.com... now imagine if your printed newspaper shot at you a GPS receiver with a mic, a cam, etc. Surely it wouldn't be morally wrong to duck and avoid that bug?

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by stevesearer on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @01:20PM (#11299009)

You're still susceptible to ad-blocking if you serve an plain image ad from your own domain though, which sucks for those of us who do it. If there is a way to alert users that you vet, self-serve, and don't use animated ads, I'd love to know about it :)

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by JorgeGT on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @02:43PM (#11299702)

Uhm, I use uBlock Origin and when going to the site in your profile I don't see any image blocking (just google analytics and social media plugins). The ads in the sidebar (id="ws_widget__ad_codes-3"?) display just fine, and I would say that your site is the perfect example of how ads should be: highly relevant, static, well designed, correctly integrated in the look and feel of the page...

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by stevesearer on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @04:46PM (#11300547)

The last time I checked with Adblock or Adblock plus (I don't remember which) I seem to remember it filtering out commonly used indicators of ads like divs with ad-related names or filenames containing _300x250_ etc... I could be mistaken though.

Thanks for the kind words too, I've really tried to make the site a place that I would personally like to browse and am glad to hear other people feel the advertising is nicely done.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by oneeyedpigeon on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @05:11PM (#11300714)

I happen to disagree with that method of blocking ads because of false negatives and false positives; isn't the solution simply to remove the offending patterns from your filenames?

I'll add to the praise for your site. Your ads remind me somewhat of those from The Deck [1], although yours are nicer because they're 1st-party. Are you able to share any info. about the model? Do advertisers pay per click or per impression? If the latter, how do you prove your traffic figures to them, or have you built up a suitable level of trust?

[1] http://decknetwork.net/

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by stevesearer on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @05:50PM (#11300958)

Yeah, filename changing is what I would end up doing.

As far as the model is concerned, a lot of the industry is familiar with magazine advertising so I just go with a monthly rate to keep things simple. There is trust involved, though most run a trial before committing to anything longer-term so they are able to see if the level of generated activity meets their expectations.

It is much easier to do this kind of advertising because the content itself is so narrow that the readership ends up being narrow, whereas a general site like BBC or CNN you end up having a wide audience and then end up needing tracking tools to help narrow the audience into smaller groups.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by squeaky-clean on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @03:32PM (#11300039)

Ads are usually filtered by the serving URL, so ads such as yours shouldn't be blocked. I just tested the site in your profile as well, and the ads were there, even with uBlock enabled. There weren't any visual differences loading the page with/without it.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by CaptSpify on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @03:16PM (#11299947)

Many sites have a "please don't block ads" notice. Could you notify users via that method?

Obviously it wouldn't work 100% of the time, but it might yield interesting results.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by mpclark on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @11:30AM (#11298076)

In mitigation I run a smallish B2B news site and I only run ads we've sold direct (and vetted) and Google Adsense to fill some of the unsold inventory. However, I found out not too long ago that Adsense now throws stuff from literally hundreds of ad networks at its clients, which is definitely not what I expected when I signed up all those years ago. I've had to go in and manually turn them off, and will soon be turning off Adsense altogether. I'm not seeking to maximise my display advertising revenue though, as I've observed it usually comes at the expense of irritating readers.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by stevesearer on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @12:55PM (#11298776)

I only direct sell my ads as well. Are your ads served via an ad network?

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by mpclark on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @01:36PM (#11299132)

We use Google DFP to manage the actual serving of our ads, simply because it is very, very good at it.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by eli on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @03:08PM (#11299875)

Not everyone has the ability or desire to personally sell ads. I think it's pretty cool that today you can earn maybe $1000/mo with a moderately popular website you run yourself.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by oneeyedpigeon on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @07:17AM (#11296422)

I wonder why The Guardian isn't (at the time of writing) allowing comments on that article. Could it be because their business model has an over-reliance on people not using ad-blockers?

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by CM30 on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @03:33PM (#11300048)

Probably because the comments would make them look bad. That seems the general reason for a Guardian article having/not having comments. If they think the userbase are likely to agree with the writer they'll be on, and if they think the userbase is likely to eviscorate them (or in cases like this, talk about adblockers and stuff), then they'll turn them off.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by Hoasi on Thursday March 17, 2016 @12:32PM (#11305461)

Really? Selective commenting seems a terrible way to handle the matter if that's the case.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by philk10 on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @09:48AM (#11297218)

maybe because it's an article and they usually only have comments on Opinion pieces?

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by oneeyedpigeon on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @10:06AM (#11297371)

It's nowhere near that simple, unfortunately. They have comments enabled on many news stories. They moderate very heavily, and as a result use a complicated system whereby comments may or may not be enabled on a given article at a given point in time, depending on a) how 'controversial' the subject is b) moderator availability.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by emodendroket on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @01:14PM (#11298953)

Well, considering the trash that tends to get posted on news sites you can't really blame them.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by sxcurry on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @12:06PM (#11298355)

Fortunately, missing the Forbes site isn't a loss - might even be a positive in terms of information content!

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by e40 on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @10:38AM (#11297649)

If I can't use your site with an ad-blocker then bye bye ... looking at you Forbes.

I can use it with uBlock Origin and the 3rd-party filter "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek‎" turned on.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by parennoob on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @11:02AM (#11297858)

I know I can do this, but

a) I like to limit the number of random extension I install on my browser.

b) The fact that Forbes turned on an adblock-blocker shows me that they are seeing a significant revenue hit on account of adblocking, which will force them to do paywalled content sooner or later. I don't value Forbes content that much (in fact, it's often click-baity), so I'd like to wean myself off it sooner rather than later.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by karlshea on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @01:44PM (#11299217)

For point a, it's not another extension, it's a list of filter rules you load in uBlock Origin like all of the others on its 3rd-party filters tab.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by teaneedz on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @07:36PM (#11301535)

Yep. I haven't even attempted to click on a Forbes link (shared, or recommended) in ages. Any site that still serves interstitials also gets promptly sent to the pits of despair or dev/null.

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Re:Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'rans... by thinkcontext on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @11:02AM (#11297857)

NYT just today pushed me to whitelist them on detecting adblocking.

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