Sinister Firefox Ad on Google Links to Ridiculous Scam

Posted 09/23/2009 at 5:23pm | by Pulkit Chandna

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Abuse of online ad delivery platforms is becoming more rampant just as the online ads industry continues to assume more lucrative proportions. A few days ago the New York Times website was making headlines for an embarrassing reason: a malvertiser – author of a malicious advertisement – had succeeded in buying ad space on the site to drive traffic to a malicious website.

But it shouldn’t take long for the New York Times to get over the embarrassment of serving a malvertisement on its website, especially now that the most consummate player of the online ad game, Google, has repeated the paper’s ignominious feat.

It is now clear that all malvertisements need not exploit third-party ad networks. Malvertisers are fully capable of exploiting loopholes in search ad networks like Google AdWords. Yesterday, TechCrunch was shocked when Google returned a malicious advertisement just above the search results when queried about the search term “Firefox.”

Although the ad appeared to be linking interested users to the official Firefox site, it was actually redirecting them to an entirely different domain, firefox.mozilla-now.com, which doesn’t even belong to Mozilla. The landing page then tried to cozen prospective Firefox downloaders into paying $2.50 per month for “24/7 Expert Customer Support.” The ad was subsequently removed by Google.

"Google's advertising policy requires that the Web site address displayed in the ad must match the domain of the landing page for that ad in order to ensure that users clearly understand the destination Web site being advertised," a Google spokesman told InformationWeek. However, the spokesman did not comment on the Firefox ad. "We use a combination of manual and automated processes to detect and enforce these policies."

Image Credit: TechCrunch