The modern internet is infested with intrusive adverts and pop-ups, often distorting user experience and in some rare cases, corrupting your devices with malware or bloatware. While website owners, bloggers, and YouTubers include them to increase their revenue, adware and malvertising are serious security risks that are often ignored by general web users.
The core objective of Adwares, a portmanteau of ‘advertising-supported softwares’, is to display a barrage of advertisements to the user.
Malvertising, on the other hand, is more nefarious since it can originate even from legitimate websites whilst concurrently causing damages of greater magnitude. Antivirus provider Norton’s monthly blog report claims that a user can fall prey to malvertising in two ways. One, when the user clicks the pop-up, and two, in the form of an attack that only requires the pop-up to load.
While there is not a single solution to more obfuscated variations of the aforementioned, a simple adblocker and other easy-to-implement browser configurations can together serve as a remedy.
Installing an adblocker is a fairly simple process. If you are using Google Chrome or a Chromium-based browser, head to the Chrome webstore, click on the extensions tab and search for adblockers like ‘uBlock Origin’. Now, navigate and click on ‘Add to Chrome’. For Mozilla firefox users and its derivatives, the process is slightly different. First, head to the Mozilla add-on store and search for the adblocker of your choice. Then simply click on the ‘add to Firefox’ button and now you are safe from a large majority of adblocks. (uBlok Origin os is open-source and therefore comes with the added benefit of transparency.)
Other methods to safeguard against web-based attack vectors include enabling ‘strict tracking protection’, which can be enabled from the ‘Privacy and Security’ submenu on the settings page of browsers. Expert users can also change their DNS (Domain Name Resolver) to ensure system-wide protection to a certain extent.