Joon wrote:Someone mentioned that the pop-up might be related to ISPs. Where are you browsing from, Rama? From Cambodia or another country?
Now that it was mentioned, I do recall getting annoying ads on youtube and other sites and pop-ups when I'm in Indonesia (I can't recall if that happened when I opened K440). So that might very well be a local ISP overstepping the boundaries.
Correct, and not only ISP related.
even in places like Canada and the States there are all sorts of nefarious things they do with advertising, companies like Superfish (off the top of my head) sell advertising and monetisation services to chain hostels, wifi providers and all sorts of companies that provide internet,
along with ISPs; there are many other companies as well.
There are various recognition algorythms and techniques, but its basically to replace site ads with their ads, many ISP's do this as well.
I mention superfish specifically as there setup is like a lot of ISPs which use a trusted wildcard certificate and actually MITM your https connections so they can even serve ads in secured browsing (Use VPNS!) - they have image recognition algorithms that seamlessly detect ads on sites and re-write the html that is served to you so you _hopefully_ don't notice the difference.
Other companies sell similar services, some are much more blatant however.
A good way to check is to go via a full vpn (not a web proxy) and access the same site from the same browser - if you can't detect any malware. this will let you know if its someone in between.
the other thing to check is that your router itself hasn't been compromised, there are a number of vulnerable routers on the market and some sophisticated botnets that will attack them, then along with borrowing your bandwidth for DDoS'es etc. in the down time will actually do similar to the commercial product and serve you their ads.
these tend to be much more blatant and less caring of the user experience than some of the other ways people inject ads.
[quote="Joon"]Someone mentioned that the pop-up might be related to ISPs. Where are you browsing from, Rama? From Cambodia or another country?
Now that it was mentioned, I do recall getting annoying ads on youtube and other sites and pop-ups when I'm in Indonesia (I can't recall if that happened when I opened K440). So that might very well be a local ISP overstepping the boundaries.[/quote]
Correct, and not only ISP related.
even in places like Canada and the States there are all sorts of nefarious things they do with advertising, companies like Superfish (off the top of my head) sell advertising and monetisation services to chain hostels, wifi providers and all sorts of companies that provide internet,
along with ISPs; there are many other companies as well.
There are various recognition algorythms and techniques, but its basically to replace site ads with their ads, many ISP's do this as well.
I mention superfish specifically as there setup is like a lot of ISPs which use a trusted wildcard certificate and actually MITM your https connections so they can even serve ads in secured browsing (Use VPNS!) - they have image recognition algorithms that seamlessly detect ads on sites and re-write the html that is served to you so you _hopefully_ don't notice the difference.
Other companies sell similar services, some are much more blatant however.
A good way to check is to go via a full vpn (not a web proxy) and access the same site from the same browser - if you can't detect any malware. this will let you know if its someone in between.
the other thing to check is that your router itself hasn't been compromised, there are a number of vulnerable routers on the market and some sophisticated botnets that will attack them, then along with borrowing your bandwidth for DDoS'es etc. in the down time will actually do similar to the commercial product and serve you their ads.
these tend to be much more blatant and less caring of the user experience than some of the other ways people inject ads.