Google Adsense Trojan Stops Riding23 January 2006
In December TechShout.com had reported a malicious program, which was hijacking Google AdSense ads after downloading itself onto an unsuspecting computer through an infected webpage. When the ad links were clicked, the malicious program forwarded the user to a page that was filled with text link ads. However the latest update is that none of the hijacked links appear any longer, raising a doubt - is this the end of the Trojan program or is it taking just a temporary Sabbath?
Raoul Bangera, who discovered the Trojan and is working with Google to resolve the issue says, "As for now, the Trojan seems to have stopped churning out the fake ads." He continues, "Either the code may not be functioning correctly or the people behind this have closed shop."
Though Bangera was surfing the web through the Internet Explorer on a Windows Operating System, when his computer was infected; its effects on other Operating Systems is still unknown. Apparently once the system is infected, the hijacked ads were visible on and operated similarly in the IE as well as the Firefox browser.
When TechShout.com asked Bangera whether Google has resolved the issue, he said, "My recent telephonic conference with Google engineers who are working on this case makes it quite clear that they are close to eradicating the problem. With the help of the log files provided to Google, they have been successful in accurately determining the culprit files causing the problem."
Google often receives complaints from publishers about the ads not being in sync with the contents of the page. Some of the complaints could probably be the work of this type of Trojan.
There have also been reports of this Trojan having been circulated via file sharing P2P networks. About this matter, Google engineers stated, "This is possible since the usual trend employed by virus developers to circulate a virus quickly is to infect a file with the virus and then spread it through various file-sharing networks. This further makes it unlikely for anyone to identify the source of the virus since it would be difficult to detect the particular file carrying the virus."
So far none of the Antivirus programs have been successful in detecting this Trojan. Hopefully, Raoul Bangera says, Google will soon come out with a set of instructions to help detect and remove the Trojan.
Source: w3reports
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