Hacker News Reader

Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

I tried a bunch of searches, it seemed like both sites had their chrome links cleaned up. (or google bought all the bing adspace)

Bings pretopresult ad for firefox is still malware. Microsoft should be liable for this - http://imgur.com/b2VuRMP.jpg

View on HN

It should. Though if search engines were actually held liable for every malware link they place above real results, Google would no longer be a profitable business. Just the fake banks Google puts in search ads alone...

microsoft writes the operating system they are infecting. then people with older computers think their hardware is too slow and buy a new one.

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?

Most of the time it's a brief look with a VM that the ad approval process goes thru, and honestly that may not show the malware.

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!

safety rating of ads should exipry like edge cache

Think about Google's conflict of interest: They ship most of the malware consumers get via malicious ads. And then they advertise about Chromebooks having no malware. Google doubly profits off shipping malware to consumers.

Microsoft, at least, has a good incentive to police their malware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com