Well I tried to download chrome yesterday, and you STILL get www.downloadchromenow.com and other spam site adverts at the top of the results, which absolutely serve malware/spyware
Until they sort out their ads it's true, it is a dangerous site
Until they sort out their ads it's true, it is a dangerous site
Taken from a comment I wrote a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7335401
They can't just ban the word "Chrome" from AdWords, though. Spammers/malware authors are very good at figuring out what's needed to slip through the automated systems.
I can assure you that for many years Google has been serving ads that link to malware for search terms like "firefox". I've seen them across different machines, different browsers, different ISPs, different OSs.
The situation with firefox seems better now but only because Mozilla is seemingly buying up all the ads for searches with "firefox" in.
Here's a post about it from a year and a half ago that also links to several earlier posts along the same lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229
Wouldn't malicious actors always be able to profitably bid more than legitimate companies for AdWords?
Assumptions: - Illegitimate business models are more profitable than legitimate ones
(Also it's rogue, not rouge.)
Common sense would dictate that Google would NOT be selling AdWords that would replace THEIR own ad for the top search result for their own products.
EDIT: Wait, you are talking about Duck Duck Go? This thread is about Google.com NOT DDG. Regardless, I get Google's official site at the top with DDG.
Oops forgot the side ads, I also get an ad from apps-2016.com.
I am searching from Canada.
Of note is that these ads are powered by, and clicks redirect through, Yahoo.
[1]: Screen shots for the curious: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jiooo37trog860d/AAAgmpY9SMxcLyIVI...
Bings pretopresult ad for firefox is still malware. Microsoft should be liable for this - http://imgur.com/b2VuRMP.jpg
how can they not use vm's and heuristics to click all their ads and see if it infects their own operating system, before approving the ads, and then rechecking them every so many clicks?
A lot of the time the malware is designed to only show up in certain case scenarios such as date/time, specific version of an OS like Windows XP SP1 but not SP2. Designers come up with the most ludicrous ways of circumventing the Ad approval process, and with hundreds to thousands of new ad's per day there simply isn't an easy way to do all that testing for each single new ad being served, on top of discovering new methods used to skip the checks.
Some networks are truly terrible and just have automation systems but those networks aren't as profitable and are beginning to die out.
With deep learning networks becoming so popular I do often ponder if this type of prevention could be automated slightly better!
Microsoft, at least, has a good incentive to police their malware.
IIRC when I searched for FF or Chrome, the top 4-5 results were links to third party sites, but when searching for nvidia drivers the official site was the first non-ad result. Definitely seemed suspicious, and also made me realize how much I missed apt.
Top three results on bing.com also point to google.com.
Didn't get any malware links like that.
Windows software installation model is horrifying.
Additionally, the AUR is about as curated as Google Play, and I trust Google Play exceedingly more than random download links on the Internet. You can audit AUR packages via its rating, the number of comments it has, its popularity, and the website enables you to flag packages as malicious, the same way you would flag APKs on Google's service.