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Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#141

Post by quietpain »

johnklos wrote: post #119

"The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google." OF COURSE they were verified by Google. Google verifies identity by accepting money. Give them money, and you're verified. "Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email" Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? I haven't seen a resp…

  Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email?
Google's strategy has always been to focus on the things that scale. Having a human answer a phone or a mail doesn't scale, so no customer service for the users.

I think this is also the reason why these ads get through: to detect them they rely for a large part on crowd-sourcing: that "report a problem" link is IMHO one of their main mechanisms to deal with filtering out the bad ones. If more get through then it might indicate that the scale is tipping to the point that crowd-sourcing relies on too few people who go through the effort.

Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#142

Post by DistractionRect »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #136
johnklos wrote: post #119

"The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google." OF COURSE they were verified by Google. Google verifies identity by accepting money. Give them money, and you're verified. "Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email" Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? I haven't seen a resp…

To be even more frank, Google's search capabilities diminished around late 2000s early 2010s for me. I used to be able to write out anything verbatim and find it. Now I can't even get the double quotes trick to work properly. Google's strengths have been slowly crippled for years. Windows has a similar problem: marketing / ads is ruining an otherwise decent product.

I don't know if it still works, but plus triple double quotes used to work as a verbatim match. Iirc I picked it up here when they broke double quote search a while back (which they fixed at some point).

But last I checked, +"""search phrase""" works

Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#144

Post by rangerelf »

ankit219 wrote: post #130
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #107

"the company has said it promptly removes fraudulent ads as soon as possible after they’re reported" If they wanted to be part of the solution they'd vet the ads before they're made public. But that doesn't scale, and so people get scammed and society suffers and Google makes more money than it knows what to do with. Pretty fair trade...? As others have said in one way or another, blocking internet advertising is par…

I guess it's a fine line. If Google starts pre screening ads and then bans somewhat legit ads - which may or may not look as legit - then we will see reports about them. Moderation is a tough problem to solve. We want convenience with the right stuff, and strong blocks with even slightly shady stuff. They are bound to miss a thing or two. Question here is that is this an edge case or a prominent one (as in do they ha…

I think you're giving them an unnecessary pass, the incentives are completely in their favor: don't screen ads, make money off ads that are frauds, scams, age-inappropriate, etc... wait for "someone" to report those ads as such; meanwhile, keep making money off them, and the scammers/frauds/etc keep making marks.

The human-friendly way would be to screen ads before airing them, which means hiring teams to do the screening; have an appropriate legal language in the ad screening section saying that ads may be rejected for "Reasons" which will be explained in the rejection note, and the rejection can be appealed upon which another person will deal with the rejection review process.

It's not a difficult problem, but it gets in the way of making money hand over fist.

Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#145

Post by DistractionRect »

quietpain wrote: post #141
johnklos wrote: post #119

"The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google." OF COURSE they were verified by Google. Google verifies identity by accepting money. Give them money, and you're verified. "Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email" Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? I haven't seen a resp…

Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? Google's strategy has always been to focus on the things that scale. Having a human answer a phone or a mail doesn't scale, so no customer service for the users. I think this is also the reason why these ads get through: to detect them they rely for a large part on crowd-sourcing: that "report a problem" link is IMHO one of their main mechanisms to deal with…

AFAIK, they do man a public relations address. It's for managing news outlets, not customer support.

Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#146

Post by barryrandall »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #107

"the company has said it promptly removes fraudulent ads as soon as possible after they’re reported" If they wanted to be part of the solution they'd vet the ads before they're made public. But that doesn't scale, and so people get scammed and society suffers and Google makes more money than it knows what to do with. Pretty fair trade...? As others have said in one way or another, blocking internet advertising is par…

I don't do content moderation unless I'm getting paid or it's for a good cause. Neither of these things is true about Google ads.

Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#147

Post by hightrix »

abfaqb wrote: post #10

1) Use an ad blocker, always. 2) In advertisements, Google shouldn't allow the advertiser to modify the domain that is displayed. Really, why do they even do this? 3) IDN shouldn't be enabled by default.

> 1) Use an ad blocker, always.

There used to be a time where it was moral to whitelist trusted websites to give them ad revenue. That time is far gone.

Stories like this are a stark reminder to use a good adblocker (uBlock Origin) everywhere on every site all the time.

To reuse an overused analogy, adblockers are like condoms for the web.

Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#148

Post by bluGill »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #126
hkt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My seven year old kept being advertised shaving equipment, including razors. Obviously they know dad has a massive beard. Jokes aside though, I'd rather nobody be piqueing his interest in blades so I've adblocked the entire house.

It's be funny if there was baby shaving cream—like baby shampoo but shaving cream and for babies (as advertised on bottle)

There is. Goes with a plastic razor that won't cut anything. I've seen it before, it might or might not still be in the toy section of your local WalMart.

Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#149

Post by bluGill »

barryrandall wrote: post #146
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #107

"the company has said it promptly removes fraudulent ads as soon as possible after they’re reported" If they wanted to be part of the solution they'd vet the ads before they're made public. But that doesn't scale, and so people get scammed and society suffers and Google makes more money than it knows what to do with. Pretty fair trade...? As others have said in one way or another, blocking internet advertising is par…

I don't do content moderation unless I'm getting paid or it's for a good cause. Neither of these things is true about Google ads.

Good cause is not being sued by attorney generals for promoting scams...

Re: Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

#150

Post by ravenstine »

quietpain wrote: post #141
johnklos wrote: post #119

"The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google." OF COURSE they were verified by Google. Google verifies identity by accepting money. Give them money, and you're verified. "Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email" Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? I haven't seen a resp…

Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? Google's strategy has always been to focus on the things that scale. Having a human answer a phone or a mail doesn't scale, so no customer service for the users. I think this is also the reason why these ads get through: to detect them they rely for a large part on crowd-sourcing: that "report a problem" link is IMHO one of their main mechanisms to deal with…

In that case, few things will actually scale for The Google except scaling itself. The only reason that The Google even has things like Gmail is they consider it a loss leader, and the only reason quirky things like Google Books still exists is because there is just enough engineers who care at that company that said projects get (barely) maintained. Otherwise, it's all about growth and scaling things, and because of the level of decoupling between the customer and the business model from direct-transactional perspective, there is little to no need to treat the customer as if they exist at all. The Google certainly have a very interesting business model, indeed.
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