Slashdot Mirror
Trojan Horse targets Google Adsense
dorkygeek writes "The Register reports that nogoodniks have developed a Trojan horse program that produces fake Google ads posing as the real thing. The as-yet unnamed Trojan replaces legitimate ads served via Google AdSense with promos for penis pills, porn sites and the like. Techshout says the Google AdSense team confirms '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.'"
In response to Slashdot's cop-outs, I would like to offer the following opposing points. Before I begin, let me point out that there isn't a man, woman, or child alive today who thinks that superstition is no less credible than proven scientific principles, so let's toss out that ridiculous argument of Slashdot's from the get-go. If you ask Slashdot if it's true that it backstabs its assistants, you'll just get a lot of foot-shuffling and downcast eyes in response. Slashdot's beliefs are based on hate. Hate, charlatanism, and an intolerance of another viewpoint, another way of life. I've heard Slashdot say that anyone who dares to avoid the extremes of a pessimistic naturalism and an optimistic humanism by combining the truths of both can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result. Was that just a slip of the lip or is Slashdot secretly trying to create a kind of psychic pain at the very root of the modern mind? Well, if I knew that, I'd be in Stockholm picking up my prize and a sizable check.
Slashdot maintains control over its grunts using intense peer pressure, manipulation of their guilt feelings, attacks on their sexuality, and fear. Don't make the mistake of thinking otherwise. Slashdot does, and that's why from secret-handshake societies meeting at "the usual place" to back-door admissions committees, its operatives have always found a way to pervert human instincts by suppressing natural, feral constraints and encouraging abnormal patterns of behavior. Slashdot never tires of trying to extinguish fires with gasoline. It presumably hopes that the magic formula will work some day. In the meantime, it seems to have resolved to learn nothing from experience, which tells us that it should work with us, not step in at the eleventh hour and hog all the glory.
Slashdot is extremely insensitive. In fact, let's see what my handy-dandy Insensitive-O-Meter has to say about it. Whoa! The needle is off the scale! It's a good thing I checked, because Slashdot's understrappers' thinking is fenced in by many constraints. Their minds are not free because they dare not be. Slashdot says that we can change the truth if we don't like it the way it is. This is at best wrong. At worst, it is a lie. After having read this, you may think that the outcome of the struggle will ultimately be decided based on the number and influence of people fully informed about Slashdot's editorials, committed to Slashdot's defeat, and organized under sound leadership. Nevertheless, you should always remember that we ignore Slashdot at our own peril.
you visit a lot of porn sites. How can you tell if those pennis pills and porn sites are the real ads or just a virus?
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I'm glad it's "your" computer instead of infected machines. I was worried for a moment.
Perhaps Google just wants more premium subscribers. From the detailed article:
The Adsense Trojan Horse attacks small publishers. The premium publishers and ads displayed by Google's websites are apparently unaffected.
...LOL! Internet.
... spyware/adware does bad things to your PC. /yawn
rooooar
My question is, how long did it take before anyone noticed? "Hey! These adds are more relevant than usual!"
This better not reduce my click through rates on my ads. I'll be pissed!
[%] Cingular Ringtones
I'm not going to get the penis pump I ordered from the ad? I guess I am worried about the wrong virus.
The Techshout article fails to mention that this appears to affect Windows users only. The Register calls it the "latest Windows malware threat", while one comment on Techshout confirms it. I suspect, without further details, that the Trojan Horse affects IE somehow. Anyone else have links to more technical details?
Software freedom...I love it!
...for creating a platform of search results and ads that others can use to exploit.
(Well at least that would be the stance garnering karma if we were talking about MS)
But if you had a Macintosh... Nevermind.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Wow, program that installs software on your computer changes how you view websites! Thanks "The Register" programs like this have never existed before!
Shouldn't you be posting articles about how Wikipedia killed your father? Or did you just need to update another crappy portion of your tabloid's website for a change?
"Most of the ads were about gambling or adult content, which are banned categories in Google AdSense, clearly indicating a suspicious origin." It looks like it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure things out...
An advert is an advert, I block them all. I doesn't matter whether it's linking to some porn site or to some site selling digital cameras, it's all bollocks as far as I'm concerned.
Why does it matter to the user whether it's a 'legitimate' Google advert or not?
Google got enough money from shit, kill the ads live a more happy life.
What? Macs are immune to the viruses and adware, spyware, trojans, etc, etc, etc, etc, that plague PCs?
Why in heavens would anyone use a PC then? Must be one of those masochistic geek things.
very own shiiter, Is busy infighting be a c0ck-sucking I'm sick of it.
If you modify the users HOSTS file to point pagead2.googlesyndication.com to a different machine you can serve your own Google ads. Pretty clever, I'm surprised this hasn't happen before. I don't know how Google could stop this.
What, me worry?
Google.
Hey McFly! This will only stop when people stop clicking on penis ads. Who the fuck clicks on any ad?
It's a good thing I never click on any ads then.
I could be wrong, but isn't this the first time the word 'penis' has actually shown up on the /. frontpage? (Not counting polls and the comments slashbox) I'm bored, can't you tell? (Tired actually, was heading off to bed. Happy New Year, everyone!)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
A couple of years ago I was asked to look at a heavily infected machine. One unusual spyware program that was on this PC would intercept Google search requests and respond with several pages of ad based related hits that looked just like valid Google pages. I never did figure out what the underlying piece of spyware was causing it but was eventually successful removing it with Hijack This.
That kind of trick only works to force upgrades of monopoly business. Even then, it's questionable how many times you can do it. A bad reputation will eventually kill your business. Google is not so stupid.
All this will do for Google is tar their reputation as the clueless click through to porn and think Google sent it to them. Google's good reputation is what makes the trick work in the first place.
In the end, blame will go where blame belongs. It's more likely that this is just another crappy ad server from the usual suspects that replaces real ads with spam. You won't see it on other operating systems. Such replacements and poor performance are already well known to anyone who's used M$ for more than a year. The word gets out and blame goes where it should.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Some quick differences between a Google and Porn Ad:
Those are a few of the differences.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Don't visit untrusted pr0n sites on a Windows machine. Make a Linux partition for such things.
History. Can you find a dirtier bunch outside jail? Start with an OS made by people who consider your desktop something they can use to sell advertising space to the highest bidder. Couple that with M$'s notorious efforts to discredit previous competitors and penchant for lying about it with very expensive PR campaigns. From bogus error messages for competitor's programs to fake letters to lawmakers, M$ has done it all. There's no technically competent person who would put any dirty trick beyond M$.
Motive. They hate Google. Google is a double competitive threat to them. Google has, for a long time, been a better technical resource than Microsoft's or anyone else's manuals and resource pages. The is especially true for free software issues. Now they Google is moving into territory M$ thinks they own. The hatred is personal, with people like Steve Balmer throwing chairs and Bill Gates saying sour things when asked questions. It's weird but that's how control freaks act. This little trojan attacks Google's credibility and strikes at one of their funding mechanism.
Means. M$ has money and knowledge.
Opportunity. M$ has extensive computer networks. They can make these things themselves or pay other to do so anytime.
Now nuts. It's much easier to think that this is yet another spamming tool that seeks the weakest and most widely dispersed target, M$'s crappy OS. Yet successful another high profile attack is not what M$ wants. Nor can they really want to destroy the world of online advertising. M$ wants to sell server software themselves.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You're all missing the beauty of porn spam. They say "Hey there burntash, here is some porn might have otherwise missed out on." To which I say, "Why thank you for your consideration of my libidinous pursuits. I will gladly partake of your tasty porn." It's a very symbiotic relationship. (inktank)
and it was rejected. Is it more relevant today?
This is a fair question, and I'll try and give you a fair answer.
The problem with Windows is that it took over the business world and forced a lot of us to work with it. We quickly found out that its quality was dreadful, and yet we could not make money with Unix because everyone was running pell-mell towards Windows. Thus, a HUGE amount of resentment towards Windows, because it was lousy, and because people were forcing us to use it.
Apple, on the other hand, gave us a deal. "Hey guys," Steve said, "What if you could use a platform that has designer beauty, that will run all those cool commercial applications like Photoshop, but that is Unix underneath so you could run all your great free software?"
Well, at the time he made this offer, computers running Linux either used window managers that took a week to set up, or had fonts that were so ugly they rivaled kindergarden scrawls in legibiilty. And to make matters worse, the developers of KDE and Gnome decided that Windows was the be all and end-all of user interface design and implemented the whole shooting match, from the Start button to the taskbar.
So we started playing with the MacOS and we realized that this wasn't half bad. In fact, it's pretty darn cool. It's beautfully designed, well-engineered, and we can still play with our favorite command line toys. And hey, we're starting to make a few bucks, we don't need to put together a computer out of random dumpster parts for $2.98 anymore. We can afford a little luxury, and Apple's PowerBooks and PowerMacs are the most luxurious personal computers made, from the quality of their keyboards, to their screens, to their elegant metal finishes.
Is it really that bad to run software controlled by a company? The reality is that it depends on the company. True, Apple equipment's expensive, and operating system and bundled software updates cost money. But Apple has never failed us. Each release brings us wonderful surprises and new fun stuff. The basic OS is solid as a rock, as long as you don't cheap out on your memory.
To jog your memory, there are a lot of people who used Windows 2000 who loathed XP because of how oddly they switched things around. Apple has never done that. When they make improvements, they make sure they really are improvements. In short, although Apple is not a perfect company, they have shown themselves on the main to be a good, trustworthy partner, making computers that are genuinely beloved by the people who use them.
In short, the problem of being controlled by a company depends on the company. And so far, Steve Jobs and his team have never failed us in creating cool, fun to use products. I don't think the Linux guys can say the same thing, since what they've done most of the time is to rip off old Windows and X11 interface ideas. Steve's willing to do things that are original, and beautiful, and some of us like both of those things, very much.
It it nice to be able to play around and tinker with the OS? Only if you have time to burn. Many of us don't anymore, and would rather create something cool ourselves rather than messing around with someone people have already done. And I haven't noticed anything about the MacOS that seems like human waste products. it looks like a beautiful, slick, well-designed system that I genuinely enjoy using.
In the end, for me, that's what matters, not whether I can fool around with the scheduler to my heart's content.
Hope that helps.
D
Google sure is trying to have the best of both worlds then. A "strict" adsense policy of no ads for porn and gambing? This is splitting some fine red curly ones by St. Google. Anyone can check this out, if you run a google search for porn or gambling (pick your own terms, should be easy enough to figure out), gee, those sure look like paid ads that show up on the right hand navbar. Which is it Mr. Google? And if "righteous" google is so against porn and gambling, why do they even crawl and index the sites in the first place? Sounds more like pompous hypocrisy to me.
Remember to make my sarcastic posts more obvious.
..only click on ads they think are placed there by reliable, trustable search providers like google.
after all, would you want some cowboy flybynight popup-advertising malware-spreading criminals enlarging YOUR penis?
my password really is 'stinkypants'
does any one have a sense of humor anymore?