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Thomas Ward Mod
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Suspect malware behaviour when accessing askubuntu and or any stack exchange site from firefox

I am having this very strange pop-up ads issue when accessing any Stack Exchange site using Firefox. Whenever I click I get redirected to ads. I have done and tries the following:

  • cleared cookies, history, cache, etc.
  • disabled Firefox sync

but nothing works. I accessed Ask Ubuntu from Chrome and I didn't have that issue there. Now I did this based on this post:

  1. opened page source code for Ask Ubuntu, and I saw this:

     <body class="home-page new-topbar">
     <noscript><div id="noscript-padding"></div></noscript>
     <script>(function () { var old = $.fn.contents; $.fn.contents = function () { try { return old.apply(this, arguments); } catch (e) { return $([]); } } })()</script>
     <iframe id="adzerk-user-match" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" onload="window.AUMIframeDone=true"
         src="https://ssum-sec.casalemedia.com/usermatch?s=183712&amp;cb=https%3A%2F%2Fengine.adzerk.net%2Fudb%2F22%2Fsync%2Fi.gif%3FpartnerId%3D1%26userId%3D"
         style="display: none;" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"></iframe>
    
  2. But on Chrome, I see this with the same method as in 1:

     <body class="questions-page new-topbar">
     <noscript><div id="noscript-padding"></div></noscript>   
    
  3. Opened Ask Ubuntu in Firefox inspect tool and I saw this, just like in chrome:

     <body class="questions-page new-topbar">
     <noscript><div id="noscript-padding"></div></noscript> 
    

Now I don't know where that piece of injected code is coming from but its only seen when using Firefox. My problem here is that I get this issue only when on Stack Exchange sites.

How can I tackle this?

George
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