Malvertising Up By Over 200% 174
An anonymous reader writes "Online Trust Alliance (OTA) Executive Director and President Craig Spiezle testified before the U.S. Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, outlining the risks of malicious advertising, and possible solutions to stem the rising tide. According to OTA research, malvertising increased by over 200% in 2013 to over 209,000 incidents, generating over 12.4 billion malicious ad impressions. The threats are significant, warns the Seattle-based non-profit—with the majority of malicious ads infecting users' computers via 'drive by downloads,' which occur when a user innocently visits a web site, with no interaction or clicking required."
Re:It's one of many reasons why Adblocking is mora (Score:4, Interesting)
No, he's implying ad servers need to start acting like a responsible industry. They pollute the web with malware and make a lot of sites unreadable with adblocking, owing to the moving, flashing and sometimes audible garbage that cover some sites.
If a simple text article with a few associated photos causes my computer's fan to wheeze and slows it to a crawl, and the ads keep breaking my concentration, AND they pose a security threat that (over the years) has gone from significant to huge, then their business model is just attempting to use you as a pair of eyes with a wallet attached. FUCK THEM.
Website operators like Ars Technica and Slashdot should be researching ways to deliver ads that are safe and sane -- there is no justification for a friggin' advertisement to be otherwise. Its just too bad the advertisers don't trust the content creators to serve the ads themselves. So what we get is a cycle of mistrust and negligence that puts their readers at risk of attack. Its sicko.