AdTech 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.
Ads providers should be held responsible for delivering malware. All the tracking (that includes fingerprinting for clients that do not want to be tracked) should also be illegal.
How is this acceptable for society goes beyond me. And then corporations blame individuals when they get scammed. It is your fault that we have all your information and leak it everywhere, when it is not just directly sold.
And add jail time to fines. Fines means nothing for the rich.
I think it would be nice for them to be held accountable but I get the feeling this is part of a wider nation state intelligence apparatus and I doubt that they will hold themselves accountable.
nah, you'll never get there that way. Even if there was willpower to do it legislating these things is too hard.
What we need is some greedy lawyers and civil liability. Find a campaign that infected enough individuals, fire up a class-action lawsuit against the website on which the ads where actually shown (not the ad provider).
If they win the landscape will change. It would set a precedent for civil liability for infecting your users even when it's not your content directly. That would likely spook the shit out of the market, security becomes a feature.
Why the website instead of the ad provider? The website didn't server the ad. The ad provider did and should be the responsible part to ensure what it provides is not malicious.
Attacking a single website does nothing. If you bankrupt the site, there are millions more sites. If you attack the ad provider, bankrupting it, and shutting it down, millions of sites are now protected.
Your logic just doesn't compute
Ideally, you'd sue the website because the website is responsible for everything that shows up on the website they control, and the website would turn around and sue their ad provider because they paid that ad provider for a service that wasn't malware delivery and as a result of that ad provider's crimes (or negligence) the website now has legal costs and harm to their reputation.
It shouldn't fall on the person just going to a website to track down the vendors and third parties the website contracts with.
I don't understand how you could arrive at this perspective. If you're doing business with ExampleCorp and one of their subcontractors malfeasantly mishandles things, would you say that ExampleCorp had nothing to do with it? If not, why does that change when the interaction happens via example.com?
Seems to me the website is negligent and the ad provider is an accessory (e.g. helping to select targets for fraud), at the very least.
The website is partnering with another business, often as their primary or only means of revenue. That is their entire business. This is not you signing up for a service like Netflix. It is a B2B partnership, and in fact, if you look at the direction money is flowing, they're the ones selling the service (surreptitious access to users' computers). It is their responsibility to choose their business partners and what ads they'd be running. If they're not doing any examination of what they're inflicting on their users, and just letting whomever's buying send whatever payloads they'd like, then yeah that's negligent at best.
"I'll pay you if you run this software on your visitors' computers without asking questions" is not a "service" you sign up for. People don't pay you as a service. That's about as shady a deal as it sounds.
Websites can set CSP to not allow ad providers to serve scripts. They're the ones adding those scripts to their page, and are equally at fault. Though static ads can still point people into a fraud pipeline, and websites running those ads should be held accountable for that too.
It's fully possible to individually negotiate with someone that wants to publish an ad on your site. If you choose to take money from literally anyone who wants to do so, then why would you not be accountable when they inevitably use you to target users for fraud? You chose to take their money and not even look at what you were publishing.
> The website didn't server the ad.
Sure it did. The content coming from elsewhere doesn’t change their decision to include it when the user loads their page.
It just makes the decision wildly important.
This is no different than the “I’m too big, can’t tell what my subsidiaries are doing!” wink
Pay attention, do due diligence to do things correctly, or don’t do them.
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> What we need is some greedy lawyers and civil liability. Find a campaign that infected enough individuals, fire up a class-action lawsuit against the website on which the ads where actually shown (not the ad provider).
Laughable. As countless class action lawsuits have demonstrated the victims are never made whole, the criminals get a slap on the wrist fine that is a tiny fraction of the profit they made doing crime, and the lawyers walk away with pockets filled with cash while nothing changes.
Fine's don't work. Throw some CEOs in jail and things will actually change.
It seems like ads already violate the law via whatever that "unauthorized usage" law is that the government likes to throw around.
Too bad no one has the guts to enforce the law that way.
> And add jail time to fines. Fines means nothing for the rich.
This, pretty much. Money removes consequence form your actions. If every time you screwed up, instead of being fined you had to wear a silly hat, go on TV and apologize, or get some time behind bars, even if it were 1 or 2 days it would be very effective.
That would mean some google people going to jail...
If such a thing were passed, it can't apply retroactively. But yes, google people would go to jail when they inevitably flout it as they are accustomed to doing. We should make this happen.
People in the US have a unique window of opportunity starting TODAY (Oct 2026) in many places with early voting. I implore everyone who is able to vote in the midterms to do so.
Which candidates support the "put ads providers in jail" platform?
None of them, but if one did I bet they'd get support from voters and less bribes from the tech industry. As long as politicians value the bribes more than the support the people will never get representation. We should probably pass laws that stop companies from stuffing the pockets of politicians with money, but what politician is going to support a law that takes their bribe money away?
Not tremendous differences, mass surveillance of the people is one of the few issues that are truly bipartisan, but there's candidates better than others.
Stop, stop, I can only dream so hard.
> How is this acceptable for society goes beyond me.
Easy, when your society glorifies and deifies greed, you can excuse literally any act so long as it makes enough money.
That's it. That's the entire explanation. It's capitalism and greed.
> That's the entire explanation.
Not quite. Most people in society are completely oblivious to this happening. And their lack of awareness is why the exploiters don't face more public opposition.
That's true, even what they know is happening is so abstract and hidden that they don't really understand it.
All ads are malware.
And all spyware is "mercenary" spyware, at least in the sense that the creators only care about money and are willing to hurt others to get it.
We should make targeted advertising illegal, full stop. This would remove so many perverse incentives in the system.
The default setups are also _crazy_.
So you search for company A wanting to buy their product. You check out. Basically every setup I've audited has every tracking product ever for everything.
So you buy X, and the company sends that purchase event with your information to Meta, Google, TikTok, Applovin, Klaviyo, and 10 others.
This idea is hopelessly entrenched in every marketing department, who has leadership's ear: We HAVE to send EVERYTHING to EVERYONE otherwise our ROAS will go DOWN!
Every platform works this way, they're all set up to put giant red banners on your marketer's dashboards
"You could be getting 50% better results if you sent <customer_2nd_grade_report_card>!"
Its basically how all the ad platforms fundamentally work: they use conversion events to train their ad algorithms.
This is not the problem. You visiting any website can lead to your computer running the same code.
The main problem is that the exploits from js to code execution or data exfil are possible in the first place. The issue is that you have JS, which is generally pretty isolated, able to talk to bundled libraries (like libwebrtc), which often contain the exploits and share the same memory space. There needs to be a intermediate layer between JS talking to any such library, like process isolation with IPC for communication.
Sure, but there's a big difference between going to a sketchy, malicious site vs a reputable site that does serve ads and now being at the mercy of any arbitrary crap in the ad you didn't choose to see
I'm not sure you understand what you're asking for, or if you do you have not followed the results of this to its conclusion
This comment is meaningless without stating the unintended consequence you believe you’ve identified.
Incredible that they don't clearly say what the exploit is and what OS/hardware/apps is/are vulnerable. Still, quite a lot of interesting info about the modern ad delivery networks sewer system...
As much as it sucks for the ecosystem that's built itself up around the world wide web, good ad blockers and fingerprinting protection are as important as firewalls and antiviruses now. There's no more babies in this fetid bathwater.
A later submission has more comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103000 , 57 comments 1 hour ago
Seems like the title was too spicy / people couldn’t behave, post rank obliterated https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=50103000
Hope we follow guidelines under this link or “then nobody gets it!”
What can we expect from the most unpopular country in the world:
Based on responses from roughly 46,700 people assessing 129 countries, X ranked as the most negatively perceived country worldwide, ahead of North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iran. The most positively viewed were Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Sweden, and Italy.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260513-israel-becomes-wo...
I'm of the belief that when that happens, it is state-sponsored bots messing with the voting. Sometimes when I make a comment on political matters, it gets waves of upvotes and downvotes.
Thanks by the way for introducing me to that graph. I didn't know that anyone collected that kind of stuff.Awful lot of words here, but not much explanation of the actual capabilities of the "zero-click spyware". Tacking on the phrase "zero-click" suggests some kind of browser exploit, but it seems like this is just the same sort of thing as tracking cookies, third-party telemetry etc.
No, they’re using those same techniques,
and they’re just as troublesome as they were before,
to the degree they’re provably being used to decide who to send malicious payloads to…
Zero-click simply highlights if the user needs to actively interact with an element to get a malicious payload - or not.
This did get me interested in the specifics of the payload, though:
“It maintains persistence via COM hijacking by overwriting a legitimate COM class registry key’s DLL path with a first-stage DLL dropped in C:\Windows\system32\IME\, and it stores encrypted second-stage payloads in the configuration directory. A signed third-party driver (physmem.sys) enables kernel-level memory access and API call proxying to avoid detection. To preserve system stability, DevilsTongue reinjects the original COM DLL during hijacking, disguising this action through shellcode manipulation of the LoadLibraryExW return value. All additional payloads are decrypted and executed only in memory, allowing the malware to steal credentials from LSASS and browsers, access Signal messages, and use browser cookies to impersonate victims on platforms like Facebook, Gmail, and VK. The malware’s use of scrubbed metadata, encryption, and unique hashes for each file further complicates detection and analysis.”
from https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/tracking-candirus-de...
thank you for providing that citation; the recorded future article does provide a better explanation of the exploit details that the original post
Yes, in fact I skipped to that section. It describes targeting, and then a vague mention of ad impressions leading to "connections" to a C2 server (but the simple fact of contacting a domain doesn't establish C2; anyone can send an AJAX request anywhere). Then they describe a "fingerprint" of servers which appears to consist of... HTTP responses with several blank fields and a claim of running on Apache. Then they say that they found a compromised DLL, which they attribute to the ads based on the DLL hard-coding some domains related to the ad campaign.
But there is nothing explaining how the DLL becomes zero-click compromised by the ad.
> they attribute to the ads based on the DLL hard-coding some domains related to the ad campaign
No, their attribution is much more robust than this. Neglecting those details to oversimplify your explanation is intellectually dishonest.
> there is nothing explaining how the DLL becomes zero-click compromised [...]
They do, just a little later in that same section: "Both samples use a COM hijack for persistence [...]" through a malicious DLL.
How paranoid should one be of, say for example, a wasm vulnerability exploited on zero day by a bad JS ad?
I am scared for my parents to get exposed to this kind of thing from bad ad network actors. Does anyone have some practical concrete recommendations they took? Like I don't think they can install ublock origin and whitelist sites on demand in Firefox they way I do.
The only practical thing right now is to make sure they don't have the money on device and have 2 fac for email and bank accounts. But every now and then there are phishing attamepts that they could fall prey to.
Someone should look at mergers of large digital advertising companies after Trump's most recent election... And then look at the timing of it. The countries involved happened to be Israeli and have many employees based out of Argentina. Which is crazy since the United States, Israel and Argentina happened to become extremely close after that election cycle...
The CTO happens to have worked for Radware
https://www.innovid.com/about-us/news/mediaocean-completes-a...
I wonder how we're going to unwind this mess in the upcoming years. It seems as if there was a concerted effort to plan this all out before Trump got elected, and then everything fell into place. They obviously have a post Trump plan ready to go. I partially blame the left(really the moderates) in the U.S. For being so unbelievably complacent that it led us to this mess. I just wonder how we're going to unwind this. Nothing lasts forever, but the transition in between states always tends to be disrupting.
Moderates in the US are funded by AIPAC as well.
The timing just seems very peculiar. I wish investigative journalists would do further investigation into this topic.
I’m a little confused how mobile ad targeting ends up as a DLL hijack?
This was my first question as well. There’s a big gap between “ad network delivers JS” and a zero-click browser exploit. CitizenLab has done some great research including OSINT on the former, but there’s a conspicuous gap between it and the DLL ending up on the victim’s machine.
There are mentions of CVEs in that article with Chrome exploits.
mobile ads can deliver JS-based exploits
But how do the DLLs hack you
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It doesn't make sense how this is even possible.
uBlock Origin ftw
Plus a dns based blocker for other apps. Android has an option ready for that, iPhone it will be like VPN.
Actually you can load a configuration profile on iOS and force everything to a custom DNS. Works great for me on NextDNS
Then you can drastically reduce the mobile in browser block list which helps a lot with battery
And wBlock on Safari.
It does not support Manifest-v2.
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Why would anyone trust any Israeli cybersecurity firm at this point? Any website or service knowingly utilizing their services is a huge risk. They're already deeply embedded in federal and local governments so there is a strong sense of doom.
Apps should be required to disclose every single ad network they use as part of their app store disclosures. I want a lot more transparency as to where the ads are coming from inside the app itself.
I've witnessed consumer apps throwing quite heinous malware/sketchware advertisements and watched the banners rotate between 4-5 different ad vendors to keep things hot and spicy.
The incentives are lopsided, there’s so much money to be made by selling access to you and your devices, and controlling you, than just taking your money.
Indeed, it seems there are some externalities that a 100% free market doesn’t protect against for which regulation is probably the best tool.
A regulation here that applies to all app stores is even business friendly as an appstore which wanted to do this already wouldn’t be punished by trying to do this on their own, for the reasons you mentioned.