alt Hacker NewsAdTech engineer here (some 13 years in the industry). A couple of notes:
- The report is highly sensationalist in the "zero-click" aspect. It details to some degree the aspects of distribution and C&C but goes very vague the main point - what was the mechanism that activated that zero malware in a zero-click fashion.
- To the point below that "ad providers should be held responsible." There is no such thing as "ad provider." The AdTech ecosystem is teeming with different niches and business models - see the famous LUMAscapes diagrams: https://lumapartners.com/lumascapes/ . The sheer volume of traffic makes it virtually impossible to vet even a fraction of it. Google has thrown a lot of compute power to pre-scan 3p creatives and even then bad actors can sneak through. Add to this a lot of sophistication on their side (from different landing pages based on the perception of the type of user to farming throw-away advertiser accounts aimed at running just one campaign like that to hijacking legit accounts through sophisticated technical and people engineering means). In the end, politicians full of indignation do what politicians always do - sue or fine Google and call it a victory, whereas the true bad actors just keep going.
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Not to jump on you after everyone else did (although I agree with them), but they didn't give you a solution. The solution is unfortunately for everyone a robust KYC regime. Then the linkages stop being impossible to track and instead become merely burdensome.
> There is no such thing as "ad provider."
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.
> virtually impossible to vet even a fraction of it
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.
Your appeal to authority as an "AdTech Engineer" works against you when support your own industry. You have a conflict of interest. Of course you will try to do damage control and PR.
This was my main question as well. I read the report, but I'm still not clear on what the browser vulnerability is. This clearly seems like something browser vendors should be able to patch, correct?
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.
>The sheer volume of traffic makes it virtually impossible to vet even a fraction of it
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.
Prior to online ads, that is ads that existed on TV, print media, etc, ads were properly vetted. Very few outright scams made it through.
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.