Pornhub Bypasses Ad Blockers With WebSockets
BugReplay (via Hacker News):
Initially, the risks to ad blockers seemed theoretical; the examples of sites that were employing this technique were very obscure. Then in August 2016, an employee of the company that owns Pornhub.com (MindGeek) started arguing against adding the WebSocket blocking capabilities to the Chrome API. Pornhub is the 63rd most visited site on the Internet according to Alexa. I checked out a few of MindGeek’s sites and sure enough, I could see ads coming through even though I had Adblock Plus on. The ads on Pornhub are marked ‘By Traffic Junky,’ which is an ad network owned by MindGeek.
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When the WebSocket loads, the browser sends a frame with a JSON encoded payload for each of the spots it has available for ads.
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Since I started looking into this, AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin have shipped workarounds to block this technique. AdBlock and others still do not.
