Phew! It killed a whole day of mine.
For last few days, I was bombarded with annoying Adware popup from Adsmatte. I first noticed it when I navigated to my blog for updating the template. Insaneously, I was surprised by bunch of ads popping up from my blog when I click on the post title or whenever I make any random clicks on blank area. And, that to without my consent.
I was facing this issue in both Internet Explorer as well as in Firefox. Initially, I thought it was because of any addons that got installed in my browser. I cross-checked the add-ons, disabled it, reset the browser, deleted temporary files, opened in InPrivate mode; but didn't helped at all. Along with this, I saw this issue in my other laptop and in windows phones. That gave me red signal. Does the malware affected my router or ISP? And, it's start spreading to all devices connected my router. Ah, oh! Literally, I have tried everything except Refreshing my PC and resetting my phone.
I searched through the internet and could hardly find 2 threads - (http://forums.androidcentral.com/moto-g-2014/528571-adware-redirects-most-websites.html, http://www.asus.com/zentalk/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=8189) which explain this problem. I am very surprised by the timing of this issue. Because, the thread was opened approximately on same day, I started facing the issue. I opened a thread in Microsoft Answers - http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/protect/forum/protect_other-protect_scanning/how-to-get-rid-of-adsmattecom-adware-opening/06b20667-586a-4ebd-9876-6d28c8528a1f?rtAction=1431798827824, and could see that other affected users too.
I started analyzing step-by-step. This issue is not related to my blog alone, I started seeing this in other websites also. If that's the case, then it should be related to some services that is widely used across all the websites. Could that be Google AdSense? Yes, that's a valid possibility. I quickly tuned off the ads code in my blog. But, the issue reappeared. That made me angry. I borrowed some patience, started digging for the JavaScript code (using IE Developer Tools) that loads this annoying popup and finally figured it out. I managed to extract the JavaScript code, that opens the annoying adsmatte popup. Carefully going through the code, caught my attention on one Google service - Google Analytics. Bingo!
I quickly commented my analytics code and refreshed the browser. There you go. No popups, no ads, nothing. It's clean and clear.
Yes, that's it. Google Analytics is the culprit here. Some nasty clever hacker has figured the loophole in Google services and targets the malware. Wait! The solution that I just figured out is a temporary fix. Practically, commenting out analytics code in every website is not practical and is not ideal at all. I believe, Google should investigate this further and come up with a fix which wipes out this issue.
Hoo!!! It's too late here. I just want to share this information with whoever reading this. So, I stayed late and published this.
Hope this helps. Please leave your comments, if it helped you.
Thanks a lot for reading this.
Thanks again.