Over the last couple of weeks, GameFAQs was hit by a round of malicious mobile advertisements, featuring pop-ups and automatic redirects to some very scummy sites. To be absolutely clear, we specifically prohibit these kinds of malicious ads on GameFAQs, but unfortunately the people behind them use a ton of tricks to sneak them online.
Its one of the biggest problems on mobile sites right now (see https://redd.it/7obdev for an example of how bad it is), and while we take every step we can to prevent this from happening, sometimes the only way we can fight it is with help from our users.
Starting today, at the bottom of every page on GameFAQs you'll find a Report Ad link that captures all of the advertising information on a page and sends you immediately to a feedback form that lets you let us know when you run into a bad advertisement: scams, pop-ups that wont close, ads that automatically take you away from the site, or anything else that ruins your experience here. If you run across a bad ad, if you can take a few seconds to report it (including a screenshot really helps too), we can get them taken down quickly and start to go after the people responsible.
If youre curious as to how and why this happens, read on.
Most of the advertisements you see on GameFAQs arent sold by CBS Interactive directly, but are instead handled indirectly through several different partner ad networks. We sell space on the site to an ad network, who in turn sell those spaces directly to advertisers (or other ad networks, who sell to other networks, and so on). We even partner with ad networks that have instant auctions for each delivered ad, so theres no way of telling exactly which advertisement is going to be shown to you in advance.
Whenever a bad advertisement pops up, its rarely as easy as just blocking the ad. We have to find out which network it served from, and sometimes that can go several layers deep. When it gets particularly bad, weve turned off all mobile advertising for hours or even days just to ensure that the site is still usable. Our ad team even has its own internal software that is constantly checking third-party ads for any unwanted activity, and weve been relatively successful in stopping it most of the time.
While every ad network is responsible for the advertising they sell to us, working with trusted advertisers and scanning the ads themselves to make sure they dont contain anything bad, the creators of these malicious ads are always working to stay one step ahead of those scans. They can have time-based triggers, only activate on certain sites, only activate in certain countries (they seem to love the UK, sorry lads), and often only target specific devices with a known vulnerability. Some of the latest ads even contain anti-virtualization software; they detect when the advertisement is not actually running on a mobile phone, and wont trigger their payload if they suspect theyre being scanned for malicious activity.
The people behind these malicious ads take numerous steps to prevent us from even knowing theyre running on our sites, which is why if our users dont let us know theres a problem, we often have no idea its happening. We hate these kinds of advertisements even more than you do, and with your help, we can put a stop to them.