Posted on 12/28/2005 7:15:47 PM PST by george76
It was only a matter of time before a trojan or virus targeted AdSense or YPM for malicious activity, and the time has come.
A new trojan horse discovered by an Indian publisher replaces Google AdSense ads with their own ads, advertising sites including dating, sex, viagra and weight loss.
This trojan is very recent, because it not only converts regular AdSense ad units, but also the Google AdSense and Firefox referrer buttons into text links.
Techshout.com reports that a new, deceptive Trojan Horse program has surfaced. The program is engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones.
The ads are incorporated in Google AdSense, the program that lets website owners display ads from Google’s list of advertisers.
The Trojan Horse apparently downloads itself onto an unsuspecting computer through a web page and then replaces the original ads with its own set of malicious ads.
Techshout, which broke the story and also has quotes from Raoul Bangera who discovered the new trojan, does not reveal the website that the computer was originally infected from, nor the name of the trojan horse.
(Excerpt) Read more at jensense.com ...
make a host file and lock it.
"Since the Trojan Horse makes the deceptive ads look like normal Google ads, the program was nearly impossible to detect by the general public."
"It has been further noticed that the Google AdLink Ads remain unaffected. The Adsense Trojan Horse attacks small publishers. The premium publishers and ads displayed by Google’s websites are apparently unaffected."
"This is not the first time Google Adsense has been hit. In January 2005, Google took immediate action and removed some ads that caused malicious code to be installed on visitor’s computers."
http://www.techshout.com/internet/2005/27/a-trojan-horse-program-that-targets-google-ads-has-been-detected-by-an-indian-web-publisher/
I don't play with Google ads, but this is an interesting development.
Current thinking is that newspapers are going to be wiped out because you can do classified ads much more efficiently and cheaply on the net. Newhouse Publications has evidently already been destroyed by this development.
But I wonder if analysts have factored in the virus and adware element? It isn't going to help make Google ads more attractive if they keep having hacker problems. Much too soon to say if this will be a significant factor in slowing down the death of newspapers, but it could have some effect.
Well, if the rise of the internet means the end of the NYT, then so be it...
If the New York Times and the rest of the old media were really smart, they would start subsidizing hackers. Because hackers are one of the few things that are slowing down the internet's swallowing their business model.
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