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Virus Writers Target Google's Sponsored Links
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the bad guys are gaming Google's sponsored links to spread their junk to people who click on the ads with unpatched versions of Internet Explorer. Attackers apparently bought the rights to several high profile search terms, including searches that would return results for the Better Business Bureau, among others. The story notes this was bound to happen, given the way Google structures sponsored links: "The bad guys behind the attack appeared to capitalize on an odd feature of Google's sponsored links. Normally, when a viewer hovers over a hyperlink, the name of the site that the computer user is about to access appears in the bottom left corner of the browser window. But hovering over Google's sponsored links shows nothing in that area. That blank space potentially gives bad guys another way to hide where visitors will be taken first.""
I really wish people would put even a bit of effort into using the term correctly.
Hell, this isn't even a Worm! It's just exploiting a browser bug to steal passwords.
Yawn.
Don't use Internet Explorer.
How we know is more important than what we know.
right click on ad, copy link location, paste into a text editor
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk?look for: adurl=http://whatever
Handy for finding ad urls when you don't want to click on them because they're on your own site because clicking on your own ads is against google's terms. Bit of a pain, but the information is in there if you want to dig it out.Loose lips lose spit.
In my experience with AdWords, there are four lines of text to fill, and one URL. The first one is the "title" and is linked to a url you provide. The next two lines are just text. The last line is supposed to be part of the url, or something related to it in some way... but you can have "hello.org" displayed but actually link to "hello.org/visitorfromadwords.html"
There isn't really a "template."
It's worse than that. The URL Google displays for the link is, of course, not the actual link; the actual link goes to Google so they can log the click-through. But the link to Google may in fact cause redirection to a completely different third-party domain, usually some ad broker who is doing arbitrage on the click-through.
Here's an example, obtained by searching Google for "mortgage rates". This is a direct Google result from Google's home page.
Note that field coded into the URL on the A tag: q="http://pixel-user-1042.everesttech.net". That's where Google is going to send you. Not to Lending Tree, but to EverestTech.net. Who's "Everesttech.net? An ad broker, or as they put it, "the leader in Search Engine Marketing".
This creates a new attack vector. The Google ad often shows the name of some well-known business, but actually takes you to some place you never heard of. That gives the third party an opportunity to try browser-based attacks.
This isn't just theoretical; it's in the wild. See this article on Webmaster World: " I just had my AdWords account hacked and it seems campaigns were setup with redirects pointing to places like orbitz.com and business.com that try to install some activex remote desktop program."
It's not clear how to deal with this. The example above is from Google's main site, not "adwords.google.com".
It's called Redirect Remover.
It doesn't help to deny changing the status bar text. The way google manages this is by rewriting the link on a mousedown event. So, it starts out going to the proper place, but when you click or right-click it is re-written to go to the redirect link. Ad links are a bit different in that the container of the ad prevents the status bar from changing by overwriting the normal mouseover event.
Check out any search link on Google. Mouse over. See the text? Now right click on the link. See the new redirection status text (in firefox only, IE will still show the normal link)? This can be done with any link using the proper javascript.
It is actually quite clever scripting. One advantage is that without javascript you still get the proper search results.