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Not only ads malvertising, but also in the main search, through SEO techniques... We've been fighting this since more than 10 years on VLC.. And they refuse to
by jbk 4y ago
Not only ads malvertising, but also in the main search, through SEO techniques... We've been fighting this since more than 10 years on VLC..
And they refuse to act on numerous reports of the same issue, over and over, since 10 years... And the Safebrowsing initiative is a joke, since they always say "it is fine".
Badware people are often one step in advance...
- O__________O 4y agoExample of prior HN post on topic: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33727981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33727981
- judge2020 4y agoSince the dawn of search really.
- shadowgovt 4y ago> refuse to act on numerous reports of the same issue FWIW, they're acting all the time. It's whack-a-mole with the malware providers.
- deminature 4y agoThey've allowed a prominent malware ad to appear on any search results for Blender for months despite numerous reports. They're not taking action on these bad actors. https://old.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/105tht4/be_aware_of_phishing_when_searching_for_blender/ https://old.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/105tht4/be_aware_o...
- shadowgovt 4y agoI just searched for Blender and I cannot reproduce this. ... but what I suspect happened is they got reports, took a few days to down the ad, the ad goes up under another URL, they get reports, take a few days to down the ad, etc. The malware vendors are tenacious and have a pretty much bottomless well of Turking for CAPTCHAs and backup accounts. ETA: none of this to imply that Google shouldn't fix the problem or that they don't need to divert more resources to it (if for no other reason than it does actually threaten their bottom line if they can't get on top of it and people conclude it's not worth it to keep recommending Google search to naive users). But the problem's generally harder to fix than most people believe.
- deminature 4y agoWhy are they accepting ads for a product from anyone but the verified maker of the product in the first place? Surely there's budget in that river of ad money to do the most basic due diligence?
- basch 4y agoIs that extortion? Pay us or malware displaces you as the first thing people see? That said, it’s pretty common to get a competitor ad above the top search result.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIt's not "extortion" so much as "stupid." "Pay us or we'll convince people our search results are crap" is a really bad business model.
- basch 4y agoYou know how many people will think “teamviewer or Firefox must have gotten hacked” before “google sent me to a bad site” OR not notice for days and have no idea where it came from?
- shadowgovt 4y agoBeing allowed to advertise on someone else's brand, trademark, etc. has been pretty much a cornerstone of online advertising since the birth of online advertising. It's justified as the way mom-and-pops have any hope at all of competing with big-box names; otherwise, Dan's Local Electronics couldn't show up on searches for Best Buy as a potential micro-targeted local alternative.
- deminature 4y agoI'm not talking about advertising on someone else's brand, I'm talking about advertising AS someone else's brand, or malicious impersonation. The most basic vetting of advertising would catch this, but apparently this is not occurring.
- QuantumYeti 4y agoI came across this a few months ago (several ads offering their own downloads for blender from copycat sites). All their downloads were hosted on GitHub and had known viruses when uploaded to VirusTotal. I reported 3 of them to GitHub, but they only removed 2 of them immediately. Checking now, and the 3rd was finally removed, but it was left up for a while. Seems like searching for blender doesn't show me any ads until I scroll down for a while, so maybe they're temporarily fixing the issue by just not showing ads for blender? shrug
- jbk 4y ago> FWIW, they're acting all the time. It's whack-a-mole with the malware providers. Untrue, I can give you quite a few who have been there forever, by private message, if you want.
- patrickaljord 4y agoyou should post publicly about this on a blog or social media if you can
- Nextgrid 4y agoThat would just make Google take them down without solving the underlying root cause. The longer he keeps them private and confirms they still exist, the more damning the evidence against Google's lies becomes.
- yazzku 4y agoWe'll just advertise it on Google.
- jbk 4y agoWe've done that quite a few time, it never changed.
- shadowgovt 4y agoTBH I never see them. I don't know what charmed allow-list I'm on in Google's infra, but 98% of my attempts to repro these reports on Reddit, Mastodon, here, et. al (Incognito mode or no) fail. This suggests to me that what people are generally seeing is churn, not lack of action (i.e. individual bad actors get taken out but they're up again soon).
- basch 4y agoYou searched websites, not windows executable downloads. There’s malware above things like VLC, Zoom, Firefox, Malwarebytes, Teamviewer, all the time. For the better part of a decade, if not longer.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- manigandham 4y agoAd fraud is a political problem, not a technical or resource problem.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIt can definitely be all three. In the political dimension, the issue could be addressed by taking advertising away from the people as a service that is generally providable and restricting the right to advertise online to a few elite who have been vetted.
- manigandham 4y agoTo clarify, I mean political in the sense of business politics and procedures, not legal. More importantly, there is no "right" to advertise nor is Google the only advertising system. The power of advertising (as in buying influence) should absolutely require vetting and approvals. This is already done today, and comes in many layers as scale and budgets increase. The problem is profits that do not incentivize stopping these ads effectively.
- somethoughts 4y agoIt'd be interesting if there were some ad network that could use "social scoring" in a way that is analogous to Uber/Airbnb between riders-drivers, guests-hosts, etc.. Publishers could rate their advertisers for ads showing up on their site and advertisers could rate publishers they are being matched with. In some way these scores could effect the search result ads that are shown. Not saying Google necessarily would/should try this but some other smaller ad/search network. I think it probably would work about the same as Uber/Airbnb, etc. - which is to say sort of working to at least get the most egregious offenders off the network with some annecodotal false positives.
- dangrossman 4y agoI think the issue with that, is that some of the most common and profitable advertising is programmatic, like retargeting and lookalike campaigns. E.g. you search for a mattress and for a few days to weeks after, you see ads from two dozen different mattress companies everywhere on the web and social media. As a site owner, 1000 people look at your site and could see 1000 different advertisers targeting them as individuals. It's not realistic for you to rate 1000 different advertisers per day, nor will the ratings be helpful if tomorrow's visitors are being targeted by a whole different set of advertisers than today's. Any boutique ad network you create that doesn't allow programmatic advertising is going to have far fewer advertisers and far less money being spent, so publishers largely won't be interested in switching.
- JohnFen 4y ago> some of the most common and profitable advertising is programmatic Correct. Programmatic ads in general should not exist. There's no way to do them safely, or to do them without spying on everyone.
- somethoughts 4y agoI think there is some huge missing gap for an offering that's something between: - Youtube sponsorship where an advertiser/brand actually reaches out directly to each publisher/influencer - Google ads where there is zero relationship between the two parties and most of the times ads that show up on your blog targeting a specific niche has no relation to your content
- brutusurp 4y agoYup... Google's response: [ ] ... And then some people who work at Google hop on threads defending privacy and security standards. Barf. Why isn't there a class-action lawsuit for this?