IOS – iPad and iPod virus

Yes, security vulnerabilities that would allow people to hack or infect Macs and iOS products do exist, though they're not exploited very often.

Pwn2Own is an annual contest where competitors try to hack into machines to win them as prizes. Both Macs and iOS products are hacked most years.

Here is one more story about an exploit that was patched:

Friday, Apple released an update to its mobile operating system (iOS 4.3.4) which patches a couple of vulnerabilities that left a door open for malware infections on the iPad, 3rd and 4th generation iPod touch, iPhone 4, and iPhone 3GS.

Apple's update describes the CoreGraphics vulnerability as "A buffer overflow…in FreeType's handling of TrueType fonts. Viewing a maliciously crafted PDF file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution."

[...]

This update comes on the heels of an alert from German IT group BSI, which warned of an unpatched vulnerability that would "allow attackers to gain access to the entire system with administrative privileges."

Apple does "verify" any software for their App Stores, but developers have been known to sneak in features without Apple's testers seeing them, so don't expect this to entirely protect you.

I have not heard of any exploit that would produce this behaviour.

The fact that the pages DO load, and only switch to another page AFTER they have loaded, indicates to me that the problem lies within the page itself. For instance some "evil" Javascript is inserted into the page causing it to redirect.

If the problem was in the OS, for instance messing with DNS, I would expect that you would never be able to reach the page and you would immediately be getting the "evil" page.

Ad networks have often been used for this kind of abuse because there are many parties providing content for ads, so it is hard to check everything that goes on. I would think that an evil advertisement is much more likely to be the cause of this problem than any malware on your iOS device.

You could try using your iPad via proxy and monitor the traffic that comes through. You could set your computer to share its internet connection over Wifi, and run a html proxy on your computer. And then look in the transferred code to see if you can identify the cause of the redirects.