Tag: Blocker | SpinSafe

Boost Your Online Security: Here’s Why You Should Install an Ad Blocker Today : Tech : Tech Times

April 14, 2024/in Internet Security

By Quincy Jon, Tech Times
Apr 14, 2024 09:59 AM EDT

New research reveals ad blockers’ unexpected importance in malicious software prevention.

Recent findings show how spyware makers employ banner advertisements for government surveillance. Innovators in ad-based spyware distribution include European firm Intellexa, which created Predator.

Documents showing Intellexa’s 2022 Aladdin proof-of-concept system was received by Haaretz. The papers indicate that Aladdin used internet job advertising to install phone spyware on graphic designers and campaigners, according to a TechCrunch report.

Malvertising: How Does It Work?

Aladdin’s growth and clients are unknown, but Insanet, an Israeli company, has created an ad-based infection system that can identify persons in advertising networks.

Ad exchanges are crucial to websites’ income, but unscrupulous actors use them to spread destructive malware to consumers’ devices. Malvertising, which uses user input to execute its payload, threatens online security and privacy.

Government surveillance can target dissenters with surreptitious spyware due to pervasive web advertising. Ad blockers prevent web browser advertising from loading, protecting against malvertising and ad-based malware.

In Feburary, FBI Director Christopher Wray has stressed the agency’s attention on Chinese attempts to enter computer networks with harmful malware, increasing fears about disrupting crucial US infrastructure, per the Financial Times.

After the Munich Security Conference, Wray worried about malware “pre-positioning” after the dismantling of the Volt Typhoon, a Chinese hacking network that targeted American infrastructure like the electricity grid and water supply and other global targets.

“We’re laser-focused on this as a real threat and working with a lot of partners to identify, anticipate, and disrupt it,” Wray said, emphasizing the need for caution.

Volt Typhoon is a notable instance, but Wray warned that it is simply one of several Chinese…

Source…

In conversation with Gene Hoffman, co-creator of the internet’s first ad blocker • The Register

July 8, 2021/in Internet Security

Interview Gene Hoffman is one of the founders of PrivNet, which in 1996 developed Internet Fast Forward, the internet’s first commercial ad blocking software. He helped found the company as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the help of fellow students Mark Elrod, Jeff Harrell, and James Howard.

PrivNet released Internet Fast Forward in mid-1996 and by November of that year, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) announced that it was buying the startup.

Hoffman has been involved in the creation and sale of two other companies, EMusic.com, sold to Vivendi Universal in June 2001, and Vindica, sold to Amdocs in 2016. He’s currently president and COO of Chia Network, a cryptocurrency platform founded by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen.

In an interview with The Register, Hoffman revisited the early days of ad blocking and discussed how the technology industry has changed over the past 25 years. What follows is a transcript of the discussion, edited for clarity.

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Hoffman: I had a friend from high school who originally went to MIT and ended up back in North Carolina. UNC was kind of oddly central to the development of the internet. A lot of people kind of don’t know the deep roots there, but Usenet was created to stop people from getting drunk and crashing their VWs as they went back and forth from Duke to UNC, because all the Dukies would go to Chapel Hill to party and bad things would happen on the way back.

Linux was hosted locally at SunSITE at UNC back in the day. When I got to college as a freshman, the World Wide Web was just finally a thing. Gopher was still something you actually used a lot. The first moment in the fall, when there were thunderstorms rolling through and I downloaded real-time radar data and watched it on, you know, some painful old Macintosh, it was like, “Oh my this is going to be big!”