I found the culprit in the Earthlink webmail page, thanks to a burp in
viewing yesterday evening. There are two instances where the HTML code is
calling "Google_ad" for the top banner, left tower, and right tower:
/wam/brand/earthlink/google_ad_top_banner.jsp
and
/wam/brand/earthlink/google_ad_left_tower.jsp
and
/wam/brand/earthlink/google_ad_right_tower.jsp
This is a somewhat innocuous function, the real culprit being Google_Ads,
which is downloading malware that bypasses ad blocking. Yet another piece of
evidence that justifies the efforts in removing anything related to Google
(deGoogleisation) from my machines, the only exception being Google Earth on
the laptop I'm presently using.
What worries me about this is that the activity indicator for my dialup
dialer showed that my machine was sending data as well as receiving during
these periods of activity. That could very likely mean that Google was using
the pubads.js script as a means of harvesting data, for which Google has long
been suspected.
>
> I've had this laptop running all afternoon, sitting on the webmail page
> all the time. The only activity I've seen has probably been the NETTIME
> clock synchroniser interrogating the online NIST standard.
>
>>
>> Soon after I did this, I restarted the laptop and watched for any
>>activity. Whenever there is a data download taking place, a small window
>>appears at the bottom informing you where the data is being downloaded
>>from. Sure enough, there were downloads taking place from the
>>"securepubads.g.doubleclick.net" URL. So, I added that to the "hosts"
>>file as well, then restarted and watched for any activity.
>>
>> There hasn't been any activity for almost 30 minutes, so this appears
>>to have put the kabosh on that intrusion.
>>
>
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
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