I use Feedler Pro for reading RSS feeds. Some strange stuff is happening on it, but not in Safari when I load the page directly in Safari, and only in certain websites. Ars Technica being the biggie.
When I pull up a webpage of the feed in Feedler Pro, certain video ads automatically run, and thus taking up the whole screen. This only started with iOS 17, and it doesn’t happen with Safari.
Now, I’m getting security warnings from Optimum when I pull up an article. But only in Ars Technica and not every time. I get this pop:
If I press the back button, it disappears and I can read the article. If I click on Continue anyway, spammy popups load — usually a fake MacAfree scan and a warning my device is infected. Sometime there are multiple popups.
This only happens in Feedler Pro and not in Safari.
Any idea what’s happening? Is Feedler Pro injecting ads? Or is Safari blocking something that Feedler Pro can’t?
The only time I saw something like this was when I had messed up DNS settings (computer was configured to use a default domain suffix for an old employer whose domain expired and was taken over by scammers). Fixing the DNS problems eliminated the random redirects to malware sites.
Now, if Safari isn’t showing this same behavior, then I would assume it’s something in your Feedler app. Check to see if it has its own separate DNS service (some apps offer that as an option), and consider disabling it (to use the device’s native DNS configuration). Also see if it is using anything like an app-specific proxy or cache that might have been compromised.
Also, if you have configured an ad blocker in Safari, you may simply be seeing the results of that blocker not running for web pages embedded in other apps (like Feedler).
