virus makers now using PPC ads to distribute…

I recently saw a blog post that the malicious creators of ad-ware, malware and viruses are using pay-per-click ads to distribute their creations and infect innocent computers. I orginally cast this off as a myth. I made the assumption that the search engines would not allow this. However this morning, after searching on Yahoo for the term “Hollywood Florida Hotels” I came across an irrelevant sponsored ad (PPC) for something on South Beach (I will not state the domain name, because chances are, they have nothing to do with the virus and are an unknowing victim). After clicking on the ad, I was redirected to a different page that, fortunately for me, my antivirus called a warning. I moved the file to my vault as my trusty AVG antivirus program suggested and closed my browser. Fortunately all was OK. The odd part about this is that I rarely use Yahoo, and was only doing this for testing purposes. Although I don’t like the monopoly that google is creating, their system works great and this is just another reason to steer clear of Yahoo. This is not to say that it wont happen on google but over the past month 99.9% of my searches are on google. I just spent 5 minutes on Yahoo and almost got a virus. The lesson to learn here… Always keep your antiv-virus and other programs up to date.

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Published On: Nov 11, 2008