A Trojan horse program is churning out bogus Google ads promoting products Google eschews—gambling, cheap Viagra, girlie photos and adult dating. The ads, being targeted at small publishers, are identical to Google AdSense ads except that referral graphic buttons are being converted to text, apparently due to a bug in the Trojan, according to the publisher who reportedly discovered the Trojan. That publisher, Raoul Bangera, told Techshout.com that the non-contextual and risqué content of the ads are what set them apart from regular AdSense ads.
"Contrary to the normal Google ads, which have some correlation to the content on the Web page, these malicious ads had no content that was remotely similar to the pages to which they had been attached," Techshout quotes Bangera as saying. "Most of the ads were about gambling or adult content, which are banned categories in Google AdSense, clearly indicating a suspicious origin." According to Techshout, when users click on the fake AdSense ads, they boot the user to three successive sites. The user is eventually dumped onto a page with a slew of ads and links to more ads.