Dave

–Dave Methvin, Chief Techology Officer, PC Pitstop

Google’s corporate reputation is incredibly good for a company of its size. Yet increasingly, Google is at the scene of Internet frauds and crimes. Our CEO Rob Cheng has described our fight with unscrupulous Google advertisers, and these problems have continued. In April, a site named FasterXP.com begun to advertise with Google AdWords, hawking a product that installed several adware and spyware applications. Since we use Google AdSense, those ads appeared on the PC Pitstop site; several users were taken in before we could block the ad.

More BitTorrent fireworks went off over the July 4th holiday. After the last episode it was inevitable that the pests would come crawling back, but so soon? I plucked two files and installed them to get the details, but I saw at least a dozen more files that are likely to have the same installer. Here’s what I found out so far.

Take a look at our in-depth investigation of infected files distributed via BitTorrent P2P networks and you’ll start to understand how hopeless it is to expect the adware industry to police itself. In some cases I think the problem is that adware companies are truly naive about how they are being played by their affiliate networks. In others, it’s easy to see that the companies are working hard on their see-no-evil position to futher their own company goals. Whether they’re being played for suckers or silently participating in this nasty business, the outcome for consumers is the same.