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Sodium Chloride

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 11, 2017
266
128
In the past few days, while browsing legitimate sites with my iPad, my browser is being redirected to another site and asked me if I want to update adobe flash player. This is strange since iPad doesn’t even support flash. Judging from the url, this is clearly a malicious site. The problems seems to occur only when I run Safari but not Chrome. How do I stop it? Was my keychain compromised? I never jailbreak my iPad or anything so I don’t know how this happened. I have iPadOS with the latest update.
 

Lucky667

macrumors newbie
Feb 26, 2020
8
4
London/SW-Germany
Never had that problem nor a idea what it is..
Have you got a backup of your iPad on a computer? In that case I would erase the ipad and bring on the backup, maybe you get rid of the problem,

cheers, Lucky
 

Solomani

macrumors 601
Sep 25, 2012
4,785
10,477
Slapfish, North Carolina
You ran into a phishing site. There's nothing wrong with your iPad. My Mac encounters these sites all the time, often I don't "go" into them, but an actual legit website that I visit (e.g. MSN News) re-directs me via one of their ad banners, and then the site instantly appears before me, asking me to DL Flash. I always close the stupid window. Problem (usually) solved.

I said problem usually solved because.... occasionally these sites, even if you close the window and choose not to proceed to the site, has already embedded some cookie in your cache. So for good measure, remember to clear your recent cookies/cache/browsing history if you recently came upon one of these sites.
 
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webbga

macrumors regular
Feb 22, 2014
244
160
Cincinnati, Ohio
I do not have Flash installed on my 27" desktop, but I get the Flash Update warning frequently. I also get it on the iPAD occasionally. I always close the window immediately and run Malwarebytes afterwards. In general, as long as you don't click on a link you should be good just closing the window although I did have on site throw a bunch of files into my Download folder that I had to delete.
 

cynics

macrumors G4
Jan 8, 2012
11,959
2,155
If you must use Adobe Flash on MacOS (try not too if at all possible) only update it via the Flash control panel in System Preferences.

This can happen with all browsers. Malicious data injected into ads that a legitimate website does not review or have other means of protecting against can allow the data to hi-jack the browser. In the case of Apple products the malicious website will need to phish for data via user input due to iOS's sandbox structure. Do NOT click on anything, swipe back or close the tab immediately.

If possible contact the websites sys admin. While relatively safe if you just close the tab or swipe back quickly its still not a bad idea to remove the websites data from cache in Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website data.

Malicious code and hacking will always be a problem. All security measures can eventually be circumvented by people/groups that have the time, resources and the motive to do so. Its not much different then ratings on safes. They are UL rated in hours until they will fail open by expert manipulation and tools. There is no rating for "infinite" time...

EDIT: I see @Solomani already covered this.
 
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