I never really seem to have had a problem like this but apparently hackers and scammers are using ad networks like Google Adsense and Yahoo Search to serve malicious advertisements which download a trojan virus to the users computer.
I think this is a serious issue and the responsibility falls on Yahoo and Google to sort this out. The comments on the theregister.co.uk seem to try to put it on the person that loaded the bogus ads but I say Yahoo and Google have a responsibility to monitor the ads they are serving and they should immediately ban offending accounts.
Some of the commenters out there feel that the ad server is not responsible for the actual content served but the publisher or website owner is responsible to track this themselves. I say thats crap. I have enoughh to do and to be honest the reason I chose Google or Yahoo as my main ad network is because there is a certain amount of trust that they will provide a good clean service to me and my website visitors. The idea I as a webmaster with over 100 active websites can manage to view all the ads served is silly and ignorant of what some webmasters do.
Both Google and Yahoo need to do something to protect the integrity of their ad serving networks or it’s going to cost them in revenue.
The trojan itself was installed via an infected PDF file that opened and closed when a user clicked an ad. It’s called Win32/Alureon, and it opens backdoor access to infected machines. This is serious business, and it’s hardly the first time we’ve seen “malvertising,” but who’s to blame when it happens? Should site owners who buy ads have to scan them first, or should the big ad networks be responsible?
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