Safari Vulnerability - Flash hijacked?

[MacOG728893]

Guys, I have been having serious serious issues with both Chrome and now Safari.

When you're about to see a normal ad come up on a macrumors page or any wbsite, it displays it for second and then immediately changes it to one of these fake ads.

Is there a major problem here or what?

 

[Nightarchaon]

Uninstall flash .. seriously, i haven't had it installed for years, long before the iPhone and iPad started the trend of not needing it to surf the web i discovered it killed your performance way back in the windows 95 and 98 days and now keep a virtual PC with clean copy of windows xp and flash installed for the one or two sites i still need to visit that cling to flash.

Without flash my CPU runs cooler, my performance doesn't suffer if i multitask and leave a browser window open and on my laptop my battery life is over an hour better, because flash a badly written resource hog that all the spam adverts use.

I really haven't missed not having it installed, webpages load quicker, and i think (but cant be sure) i get less adverts all over the place

 

[MacOG728893]

That will take care of everything?

Update: I did that and it didn't work. I cleared all cookies and immediately reopening the browser, there are tons of cookies and these horrible hijacked ads.

 

[cyclotron451]

... I cleared all cookies and immediately reopening the browser, there are tons of cookies and these horrible hijacked ads.

Hi, it's actually very hard to clear cookies, many of these 20kb text files are just like the visible part of a 90% hidden marketing iceberg! Flash has its own cookies, there are local stored objects - databases and some adverts even assign you a unique colour, storing a single unique tracking 1x1pixel in your browser cache. The non removal of any of these components allow the marketing systems to "respawn" any and all of your virtual bubble identity! The flash cookies actually are only removeable by carefully using the flash control panel - but i prefer third party tools such as BetterPrivacy

Suggestions: download FireFox (old version here) https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6.28/mac/en-US/Firefox 3.6.28.dmg
add NoScript extension (allows to selectively block java & other webpage scripting)
add BetterPrivacy extension (scans for & kills all flash cookies)
add Firebug or InspectThis (or both) extensions (allows you to forensically inspect where your malware adverts are generated/sourced e.g.http://www.badvert.ru made-up!)

You can then subscribe free to OpenDNS.com and directly block "badvert.ru" , or use an alternative method to stop them from appearing on your Mac.

There may be simpler ways of doing this, but it is important to get back in control of your computer! The program LittleSnitch can also help you to see exactly which app/url is communicating at which time - but you might be overwhelmed by data. Important to remember to always keep updated your OS and all plugins. I chose the 'old' Firefox as I know it is compatible with these protection extensions & Firefox also has a nice feature to check plug-in up-to-date'ness, Good luck!

 

[seble]

That will take care of everything?

Update: I did that and it didn't work. I cleared all cookies and immediately reopening the browser, there are tons of cookies and these horrible hijacked ads.

I suggest you uninstall safari, I like to do it the manual way, delete all of files in the library's (user and computer) search using spotlight to find all of the files

 

[GGJstudios]

You DON'T need to uninstall Flash and you DON'T need to uninstall Safari. It's ridiculous to suggest getting rid of software completely, rather than learning how to use it properly.

When you're about to see a normal ad come up on a macrumors page or any wbsite, it displays it for second and then immediately changes it to one of these fake ads.

I use Flash on Safari with ClickToFlash to control which content plays, and I have zero issues with it. Generally speaking, Flash is notorious for consuming system resources, raising temps and decreasing battery life. For Flash-related issues:

• Find your Flash version and make sure it's the latest version available. Never install or update Flash from a pop-up on a website. Always go to Adobe's site to get Flash or updates.
• Install ClickToFlash (Safari), Flashblock (Firefox) or FlashBlock (Chrome) to control which Flash content plays on websites.
• Try using the YouTube HTML5 Video Player to watch YouTube videos, when available. (May impact fullscreen viewing. See link for details.) Some have reported better performance with HTML5, while some have reported worse. Try it and find out what works best for you.

For pop-ups and other ads, I run several ad-blockers. ClickToFlash, Safari AdBlock, GlimmerBlocker and JavaScript Blocker are just a few.

If you haven't already done so, try changing your DNS servers on your Mac and your router to OpenDNS servers, as cyclotron451 suggested. This will show you how: Why am I being redirected to other sites?

In Safari > Preferences > Security, make sure you have "Enable Java" UNchecked until you visit a trusted site that requires it. JavaScript is fine to leave enabled.

Delete all your Flash cookies from the following locations (locations may be somewhat different in ML):

/Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects/
/Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/

After you have deleted all the content of those folders, you can right-click the folders indicated in red, Get Info, and check "Locked" to prevent other cookies from being stored.

 

[MacOG728893]

Thank you for the detail replies guys but unfortunately, non of that worked. I have to get a new HDD regardless because of the replacement program. So I guess I'll just take a fresh start instead of cloning this HDD. That's too bad.