Google Receives Complaints About 300.000 Injected Ads

Since the beginning of this year, Google has received more than 300,000 complaints of Chrome users on injected ads. It is the largest source of annoyance for Chrome users. The injected ads come from so-called "ad injectors".

This relates to adware or browser extensions that inject additional ads on random websites or replace existing ads. According to Google ad injectors are a problem for advertisers and websites. Advertisers do not know that their ads be injected and so have no idea where their ads are displayed. Websites are not, however, paid for these ads because they are injected locally on the users' computers. The content sometimes dubious, it may involve malware, making the injected ads are a risk to visitors. This is negative for the image of the website, which can do nothing to the injected ads.

Filter

To have to tackle Google ad injectors for several measures taken. Since July, the Internet giant has also begun to filter injected ads of its own advertising platform DoubleClick. Google allows advertisers DoubleClick Bid Manager, which can be bid on ad space. To prevent injected advertisers buy ad space, there is now an automatic filter active.

This new system will detect injected ads and proactively establishes a blacklist that prevents advertisers to bid on ad space injected. Google expects that this measure will not immediately solve the problem, but it hopes that other parties in the advertising industry will take action against ad injectors. "Progress can be achieved only if we work together," said Vegard Johnsen, product manager of Google Ads.

Weather Infected Ads Distributed By Google DoubleClick

Attackers twice in a short time managed to spread infectious ads through Google's DoubleClick. The attack, which has now become known was conducted through a company called Merchenta, which offers an advertising platform and direct ties with Google DoubleClick. Through this platform, the company would be US only deliver 28 billion monthly ad impressions.

The attackers did in this case as an advertiser and infiltrated the platform through a third party, says anti-virus company Malwarebytes. In addition, they managed to get the infected ad on the advertising platform Merchenta, after which it was transferred to the channels of DoubleClick. Contaminated ad within minutes would have had a 95% coverage in the US, Europe and Britain, which ran a large number of people risk, says Malwarebytes.

The virus fighter notes that DoubleClick is not directly responsible for loading the infected ad, but it starts with the chain of trust with the publisher, which has little control over the transactions that take place. The ad in question was using a well-known and already patched vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player to infect computers with malware. At the time of the attack, the exploit that abuse of the leak was detected by any of the virus scanner.

It was the same exploit that was recently used in another attack campaign, which contaminated ads include on the website of the Huffington Post published. The account of the attackers was lifted according Merchenta on 10 April. Two days earlier warned the Delft security firm Fox-IT for another attack that took place around the same time via DoubleClick. However, it has been used a different exploitkit for infecting unpatched Internet users.