unwanted porn ads opening without user input

[Walied Othman]

Hi all,

I use the admob sdk for iOS in my app and it is set up for mediation between iAd, Google Ads, and MobFox. In the past weeks, I have been getting porn ads either when I start my app or after leaving it on for a while. I can not reliably reproduce it, but it usually happens after a night of inactivity when I start my app again. It happens on both the device and the simulator, and it does not show the ad in the banner as I have set it up, but it immediately fires up Mobile Safari to visit an adult site.

After a few redirects it ends up at, for example, rad.reporo.net, mobile ero247.mobi, fuq.com. bitchhunter.tv, pornhunter.tv, tube.et1.mobi, ...

MobFox is my first suspect and I will dig deeper to turn off adult ads or just remove them completely from mediation,

but,

They shouldn't be able to "steal clicks" like they do, should they? And by stealing clicks, I mean not showing a banner but immediately opening Safari to visit the adult website. Isn't that behavior controlled by the Google SDK or is it controlled by the mediated providers' plugins?

Has anyone else seen this behavior?

[Amy Quispe (AdMob SDK Team)]

Hi Walled,

It seems unlikely that would be AdMob, but you should first check out the Ad Review Center (under Allow & Block ads in the AdMob interface). In any case, t's possible that the creative is opening Safari. Sorry this is happening, and good luck!

Amy Quispe

[Walied Othman]

Hi Amy,

Thank you for your reply and especially that hint (review center), I’ll use that first to see if I can track down the culprit, and otherwise start logging ad requests.

Kind regards,

walied

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[Walied Othman]

Hi all,

I implemented the delegate method 

- (void)adViewWillLeaveApplication:(GADBannerView *)bannerView

but I’m a bit puzzled on how to debug this, when an ad makes me leave the app, I want to identify the mediated network it came from and a useful identifier to identify the publisher of these (malicious) ads. 

But I could not find bannerView properties that show any of that.

Any clues?

-- 

walied

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

Hi Walled,

Introduced in 6.6.0, GADBannerView added an adNetworkClassName string property that will give you the class name of the ad network that is currently showing an ad.

Thanks,

Eric

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[Walied Othman]

Hey Eric,

That was one of the things I tried to log, but I only get null for that property.

Could that be because I use mediation?

-- 

walied

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[Walied Othman]

Hi Eric,

Ignore that last message, apparently that was because I didn’t use my instance bannerview, the bannerview that gets passed gives me the null value, but not the self.bannerView.

Thank you for all your help.

-- 

walied

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

That's odd. I'm seeing the class name show up for both self.bannerView and the bannerView passed in the callback. In fact, for me it's the same object (self.bannerView == bannerView is true).

Anyhow, if you aren't mediating it should still show up as GADMAdapterGoogleAdMobAds, per the description in GADBannerView.h.

Thanks,
Eric