A few days ago, when I was browsing the Web, I encountered something strange: When I attempted to click a Know Your Meme search result on DuckDuckGo, I did not arrive on KnowYourMeme, but a strange website called ptoszek, as well as X / Twitter. Attached is a video demonstrating the phenomenon.

Does anyone know what could have caused it? I don’t think it’s malware since I only install open-source software from MacOS Homebrew and don’t browse sketchy sites, but of course I could be wrong. I thought maybe it was Greasemonkey since it’s the newest extension I installed, but Greasemonkey is open source, so it’s not supposed to be malicious.

Information

Here is some additional information to help diagnose the issue.

Plugins

I had these plugins installed and activated the first time I encountered the redirect:

• uBlock Origin
• Redirector
• Yomitan Popup Dictionary
• Greasemonkey

No other plugins were installed. However, Greasemonkey was the newest plugin I had installed (active for less than a month). Has anyone had trouble with this plugin before?

DNS

I was initially using my ISP’s DNS server. I thought maybe my DNS request was hijacked upstream, so I changed to Quad9, but that didn’t stop the redirect.

Browser Update

I was initially using LibreWolf 153.0.1 or so (I forgot to write down the exact version, but I think it was 2 major versions out of date). I tried updating the browser from Homebrew (I was using MacOS x86_64) and revisiting the link, and the issue mysteriously resolved.