Israeli digital advertising agency Discover-Tech spied on internet users through a sprawling network of online ads that it used to track targets and help hack their devices, two research groups said on Thursday.
Its services gave Israel’s Candiru — a spyware company blacklisted by the US government — as well as other Israeli surveillance firms access to advertising platforms run by Google, Comcast, Russia’s Yandex and others, according to separate reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant.
And this is why I block all ad scripts. Sure, I might want to support the website, but I’m not going to run an unvetted third party’s scripts. Display passive ads and I’ll give them my views. Curate them appropriately and I may even click through.
You shouldn’t feel bad about protecting yourself: Advertisers did this to themselves, blame them. They have been a major attack vector for malware and scams for decades now and they don’t give a single fuck about genuinely policing anything.