Google 'powerless' to stop AdSense theft

I personally encountered this before, I was checking one of my sites on an internet cafe months ago and was shocked when I saw porn site ads displayed on my adsense spots. I know it can't be from Google, coz if it's from them then they are already violating their own TOS. I was using Internet Explorer then so I tried checking it on Firefox, and there the regular adsense text ads can be seen. Found out that it was some kind of a malware that infected IE on the pc i was using. There I realized what if other users also have the same trojans on their pc, knowing that majority of web surfers are still using IE (w/c is more vulnerable to spywares), there is indeed a big possibility that this can affect not only mine but also other publishers' adsense earnings.

Unfortunately, according to Nishad Herath, senior researcher at McAfee's AvertLabs, Google is powerless to stop the Trojan stealing Google's space on third-party sites.

"There's nothing a search vendor can do to protect against the problem since it works by locally modifying content that's being displayed on the browser. There's absolutely nothing that Google or any ad vendor can do about that."

Google said its policy is to remove sites that redirect users to malicious pages, but this approach will not prevent the Trojan from damaging its revenue since it sits on the user's PC and causes the browser to bypass the AdSense network completely. So my suggestion to all internet users out there, always keep your computers safe by frequently updating your anti-virus/spyware programs, and try using safer browsers like Firefox. ^_^

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technorati tags: google, adsense trojan, malware, porn sites