Ad automatically opened in new tab

I was browsing normally today and a new tab opened to a new Brave Ad. I was a bit puzzled as I had Focus Assistant on, so I checked the history in brave://rewards/. It does show I received an ad.
It also showed that I clicked on it. Which is impossible as I had Focus Assistant on and it blocks Brave Notifications. Suspicions were confirmed after I checked my notifications history (I happen to run a third-party notification logger mainly because Windows does not provide such function) and the notification did not appear.
Luckily, it was a Brave internal ad (for https://brave.com/surveys/b873/) but this is not acceptable behavior from Brave to be able to force open a tab from their native ads. What if next time there’s a malicious link?

EDIT: it happened again.

@talgeeze That ad it primarily showing on New Tab Page. If you have Sponsored Images setting turned on for your New Tab Page and have it set that New Tab opens on Dashboard, then you’ll get Sponsored images. For example:

Clicking on the bottom left or on the icon in the middle will click on the ad. It then opens on a new tab like you mentioned. I know I recently had that happen, where I want to click on the page/window itself and it opened.

Do you know if you might have been in the same situation? Like in the screenshot shown here, if I clicked anywhere on that big coin in the middle of if I clicked on the smaller area on the bottom left, it would act like I clicked on the ad.

With you saying nothing showed as a notification, it makes more sense to think that’s what happened. You opened new tab, went to click to focus on the screen/window, and the ad popped because you just happened to click the area of the NTP ad space for it to say you clicked on the ad.

Let me re-iterate: it wasn’t a NTP ad, I was browsing on an active tab - reading the page, no hands on keyboard/mouse - and out of the blue a new tab opened on its own without me doing anything.

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