Trojan Attacks Google AdSense

Trojan Attacks Google AdSense
By IT Observer Staff
Monday, 2 January 2006 14:02 EST

A new Trojan horse is designed to produce forge Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. The Trojan attempts to incorporate its ads in Google AdSense publishers program. Once installed, the Trojan horse downloads itself onto the computer and replaces the original ads with its own ads.

The Trojan has been discovered by an Indian web publisher, Raoul Bangera, who reported Google AdSense team earlier last week. Google said in a statement, “We can confirm from the screenshots that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.”

The Trojan produces its own set of ads, which lead the user to three different sites and causes advertisers and publishers to have poor revenue.

“There is a bug in the Trojan Horse which converts Google and Firefox referral graphic buttons into text links. Contrary to the normal Google ads, which have some correlation to the content on the web page, these malicious ads had no content that was remotely similar to the pages to which they had been attached, ” said Bangera.

well........ ouch...

well........ ouch...

u can say that again..

but you have to admit, that was a good idea for the Trojan makers.. if only they could get the ads to be relevant, then they would get alot more ppl.

Yowser! Any idea as to how the trojan attacks? Or who it affects - is it getting into people's adwords accounts? Or is it getting into the adsense code from webmasters?

The downloading of this trogan onto users pc's is probably not caused by our websites or codes.....but.....:eek: ... if it if successfull and gets onto a large amount of internet pc's then we are up the creek because they may not be aware that they have a virus so they wont get to see any real google adverts

I have no clue how it attacks.

Very strange Trojan and it would be interesting to see how this really works and how it attacks the webservers that end up infected by this Trojan. Even better the source would be great to look at, if someone comes across it be sure to share it with us. :)

From my understanding, what happens is that this trojan gets onto your computer (for whatever reason; you could have downloaded it from the web, or it came hidden in another program), and starts replacing AdSense advertisements on websites with its own advertisements on web pages.

A cunning way to earn click-thrus by stealing from the web master.

Good news