Talking to Rocks

Advent of Security: Day 8

On the seventh cyber-mas day my true love gave to me: ad blocking software, virtual machines, spam-filtered mail, a Password Man-a-geeeer, a clean file-tree, an antivirus scan, a key rotation and a clean cache with no more cooooooo-kiiiiiiiiiiiiiies

How Ad Blockers Contribute to Security

Ever accidentally clicked on one of those aggressive advertisements while scrolling your favorite news site? Yeah. Could get you hacked.

Unfortunately, more and more scam organizations are turning to AI generated ads as an attack vector. Each of these ads can correspond to a malicious download, a credential/telemetry bot or some other attack on your digital sovereignity. Ad-Blockers help mitigate these issues, and despite the current crackdown on ad-blockers there are still good ways to protect yourself.

Ad-Blocker Options

Depending on your level of technical savvy, you have a couple options:

  1. UBlock-Origin: This is a free and open-source plugin for chromium-based browsers. It has a proven track record and the development process is very transparent.
  2. PiHole: A DNS-based solution for your home network because you can just block traffic from all of the ad providers

There are similar solutions for firefox and safari I am sure, but I do not have experience with them.