NaibofTabr
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Ah, but see that would require actual human attention and judgment for the vetting process, which would cost money. Automating the ad selling process is so much better… for the shareholders.
Hmm, sarcasm aside, now I’m thinking about it and wondering if you could at least automatically scan the ad content and distinguish between say, a jpg or webp image and a potentially malicious executable. If you could prevent ads from running any code, and only allow them to display static images, that might be good enough.
What sets Insanet’s Sherlock apart from Pegasus is its exploitation of ad networks rather than vulnerabilities in phones. A Sherlock user creates an ad campaign that narrowly focuses on the target’s demographic and location, and places a spyware-laden ad with an ad exchange. Once the ad is served to a web page that the target views, the spyware is secretly installed on the target’s phone or computer.
This is the part that makes this newsworthy. Insanet uses the advertising infrastructure to target a specific group or even person, and when the ad is displayed it does not require user interaction to install itself. They’ve developed a zero-click exploit, which is very concerning
I’m not clear on whether an adblocker will actually protect you from this - some adblockers only prevent the display of the ad in your browser, but the content of the ad is still downloaded with the rest of the webpage information. You might actually need something like Pihole to block ad server addresses so that the content never gets downloaded at all, but that would make any browsing outside your home network dangerous.
No, we don’t have to accept that privacy is dead. We need to learn to control the technology around us.
This podcast covers this topic in depth with a lot of practical instruction for what you can do to manage your privacy and security: The Privacy, Security, and OSINT Show
The problem with this is that I can label a file any format I want, because ultimately the file is just a string of binary. A lot of file formats use embedded headers to make them identifiable regardless of label or metadata, but it’s completely possible to fake those. I could even give you an image file that is malware, which would be difficult to identify until it actually did something malicious.
I think to be sure, you’d have to basically detonate every ad file in a sandbox environment to see if it tried do anything unexpected, which would be… less than simple. You’d have to check it across every major browser and OS, because it might only operate on specific systems.