Advert claiming visitors iPhone was infected with a virus when it is not.
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A friend of mine tried to view my latest post only to get a pop-up saying that her iPhone is infected with a virus and her browser has serious damage. It states she needed to repair it straight away and if she left she would be blocked. The title stated ‘www.wimirk .site’ minus the space and there is an ‘OK’ button to press, which I obviously told her not to. I have a screenshot of the offending pop-up.
I’m aware it’s an advert and while I don’t mind the ads, I’d appreciate it if they didn’t affect my traffic or people trying to access my content.
Thanks for your time,
Kendelfe.The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
That is not a WordPress.com ad. We don’t show any pop-up ads anywhere. Not in the mobile app, and not on your site in a browser.
That pop-up is caused by malware on your friend’s phone. To be clear, that message itself is generated by the malware, and if you click the link to install that app you’ll be giving this malware’s creators full access to the device.
Ask your friend to immediately uninstall any strange apps on their phone and to install a trustworthy malware scanner like Malwarebytes to scan their device for any installed malware.
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She said the issue was with iPhone visitors though?
There is no malwarebytes for iOS?
Seeing the same on my wife’s site – three different people – all using iPhones.
Have also seen a couple of similar posts on the forum over last couple of days. This can’t be a coincidence surely?
How are your ads served? Is it likely one of the ad-servers has been compromised?
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Yes, there has been an increase of this and other sites creating pop-ups on iphones recently, and not just on WordPress.com – here’s a report in the Apple forums of it happening on Spotify:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7967749?start=0&tstart=0
The people who create viruses and malware have never bothered targeting iPhones because too few people were using them, but as iPhone use is starting to overtake Android use in some parts of the world malware specific to iOS is becoming more and more common. Same with Macs.
I’ll ask our advertising team to check on this, but the fact that it’s only happening on iPhones, but only on some iPhones, points to an issue with the specific devices, not with your site – I had several colleagues around the world check your site using iPhones and none of them saw this pop-up.
If Malwarebytes doesn’t have an iOS version, please try running a different malware scanner. I’m sure there would be others in the iTunes store.
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I’ve heard back from our ads team, and this pop-up is definitely not coming via our ad networks.
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Hello, this issue has also been affecting me, first of all only with my most recent blog post and it is now affecting the whole site whenever anyone with an iphone tries to open my blog. I am concerned this is going to affect readership and make friends who read it too afraid of getting the virus to open it. Has any more been discovered about this please?
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We are still looking into this with our advertising partners, but so far the evidence points to browser-based adware.
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.
Also try setting your device to block all pop-ups by default:
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