Why Can't Google Stop Malware Ads on Adwords?
Found on eWEEK on Monday, 25 August 2008
People make a lot of technical matters in security, but the most important force behind malware is social engineering, not some vulnerability or bad design.
You must have seen them by now: ads for "Antivirus XP 2008" or some variant of that name. In fact, here are some of the newer names used for essentially the same attack.
But the most interesting way this threat has been spread has been is through advertising, most infamously through Google sponsored links.
As the delivering part, Google gets paid for serving up those ads (however, the PR from all this is simply bad). Of course Google's terms and conditions prohibit spreading malware; but then those terms also prohibit the promotion of religious content. Still, it serves Scientology ads.