Google AdSense Ads Hijacked By A Trojan

Google AdSense is the most admired publisher program of bloggers like you and me. It facilitates third-party publishers and webmasters to make money online by placing text, image and video advertisement on their sites. These ads are completely monitored by Google and AdSense acts as a middleman between the advertiser and publisher. The program works after the web pages gets crawled; Google AdSense decides upon the relevancy between the text ad to content page and then places the ad with in the page incase it is compatible. This program is now in danger of getting hijacked by Trojan software, which replaces the placed text advertisement from various provider and webmasters - stated by Romanian antivirus company.

Torjon.Qhost.WU has been particularly designed to replace advertisements placed in Google AdSense. The existing ads are been replaced with alternative ads noted from the hosts outside the AdSense network. It is obvious that Trojan is making money by taking away the viewers of AdSense. The main concern is for the publishers as they may also lose revenue if Trojan gets widespread and the associated site may contain malicious code. However, the biggest prey is Google itself, as he is making huge money out of advisement. According to Nishad Herath, senior researcher at McAfee’s AvertLabs, Google is powerless to stop the Trojan stealing Google’s space on third-party sites.

BitDefender firm has lots to speak about it – apart from Trojan redirecting Google AdSense link to different addresses, it also redirects the queries that suppose to got to Google server to the Trojan servers. Additionally, the official website BitDefender explains that Trojan is by now spread at a low level causing less damage. Even though it is not been established that the ads replaced has malicious software, a BitDefender analyst Attila Mihaly says, "This is a serious situation that damages users and webmasters alike”.

Response from Google

Responding to this tremendous situation, Google commented: "We have canceled customer accounts that display ads redirecting users to malicious sites or that advertise a product violating our software principles," According to an Reuters reports. "We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware in both our ad network and in our search results. We have manual and automated processes in place to detect and enforce these policies." Google Added.

Google’s AdSense program mainly concentrates on making easy for businesses to purchase ad space on its network and to maintain the integrity. "There’s nothing a search vendor can do to protect against the problem since it works by locally modifying content that’s being displayed on the browser. There’s absolutely nothing that Google or any ad vendor can do about that," McAfee’s Herath stated. "While you would expect the ad vendors to sort of deal with the quality of people who they allow to advertise using their networking, things like this Trojan are a client-side issue," he added. Whatever Google may say – I think AdSense users are in danger and this problem has to be sorted out at the earliest!

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