why you should really be using an ad blocker
Ad blockers aren't just a way to stop annoying banners pop-ups, and videos. They can also keep your devices safe.
Illustration by Vitaly Alexius
Much like the dudebro after getting turned down by a woman at a party immediately strides to a new target until he finally finds someone willing to entertain him, and should he strike out every time, he'll start blaming women's studies classes for his failures, the online ad industry has tried railing against ad blockers which have taken click-through rates to abysmal new lows. But there is a good reason why they've become so popular.
For one, much like a prototypical ladies' man playing the numbers game, online advertisers have over-saturated sites so much so, that many web surfers find sites loading much slower and harder to navigate. Stuffing ads into every pixel, modal, and lined up for accidental clicks have made the web a worse place and actually trained web surfers to immediately avoid them. But online ads have become an annoying waste of not just time and bandwidth, they've mutated into a way for hackers to infest your computers.
An in-depth story from the UK tech tabloid explains something that security experts have seen a lot in recent years, using interactive ads to load malware onto computers. The idea is usually to load an object that can run a program into your browser's sandbox, then use an exploit to break out into the system itself, establish a connection to a command and control server, and load the malicious files.
And because so many interactive ads are so poorly programmed and bloated in the first place, and the industry is desperate for volume to make up for the microscopic margins, there are no security or quality audits of what gets displayed to you when you visit a page.
With no such audit system in sight, your best bet to avoid being infected is to download and enable a decent ad blocker. Which just goes to show that online advertising has taken abject failures to a whole new level when its services aren't simply ignored, but have to be actively avoided…
