This article needs to be flagged. Popehat or 3rd-party scripts there are triggering redirects to malicious ads about my mobile device being “infected”.
The redirect target has some obnoxious stuff like a cookie banner as well as outright malware like Google Tag Manager (which will no doubt load further malware if it is allowed to load itself).
Look up gilimp, among many other examples. There was a malicious ad which used the real gimp.org display domain but redirected to a malicious gilimp.org when clicked.
Something similar happened to me a few years back after I accidentally tapped an ad in Chrome (an ad delivered by Google no less). While I didn't get infected the site did start displaying system like prompts (my phone was also vibrating at this point and playing the same sound I get when there's a natural disaster) saying my device was infected and that I should tap OK to download an apk.
I did several things after this:
- Reported the ad to Google (no followup from their side - naturally).
A rather popular app for macOS got purchased by some shady company and they updated it to include a botnet SDK. I'm guessing a lot of the potential buyers here have similar intents.
I just visited the download.com page for Chrome and it has two ads served by Google. Both ads contain fake download buttons: http://i.imgur.com/eAATuwb.png
However I was referring to the pop up, tap intercepting redirects to the App Store.
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