Trojan Attacks Google AdSense

By IT Observer Staff
Monday, 2 January 2006 09:02 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.

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