Google Text Ad Subversion

There’s an interesting article over at ZDNet that explained that Google’s text ads are getting subverted by trojans on people’s machines to get them to click on other people’s ads. It wasn’t clear what those ads were, exactly, but there you have it. I see this kind of thing as a clear path for future monetization - similar to how bad guys are adding extra form fields into forms via malware to gain more information about your identity. Very clever, and easy to do.

This is different from when Google’s ads were spreading malware but has the same basic purpose. Ultimately getting code on people’s machines is the best way to get control of the machine and ultimately make money off of it via spam, clicks, or whatever else they come up with.