ad on blog post led to suspicious website

  • Unknown's avatar
    blueberrydad · Member ·

    I was informed that clicking on one of the ads beneath my most recent blog post led to a suspicious website by someone using their iPhone to view the post. Any way to prevent this?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    antonyagnel · Member ·

    Hey there,

    This issue has already been reported to the staff and they’re working on it to figure out the cause of this problem. Here’s what kokkieh (Happiness Engineer) had to say about this in another thread.

    Hi there,

    We’ve had several reports of this, and are looking into it, but we don’t serve any pop-up advertising on WordPress.com so it’s unlikely that we’re the source.

    This is likely caused by adware running in the Safari browser. Google “iOS pop ups” and you’ll find many reports of this happening on a variety of websites, not just WordPress.com. Ads like this have been showing up on iOS since at least 2014 from what I can find, but it appears to be on the increase in the past few weeks.

    Set your device to airplane mode and force-quit Safari. Restart Safari and completely clear the browser cache and history. Then disable airplane mode. Based on the articles I could find about this issue, that should stop the pop-ups from appearing.

    Hope that answers your question.

    You can follow the already existing threads at –
    1) https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/spam-like-pop-up
    2) https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/pop-up-spam

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