Adsense pay-per-hack? Is this possible?

June 29, 2007

This is something that came up on another list I subscribe to. Someone had a PPC campaign in the past then suspended it. A bit later his ads started reappearing, apparently rewritten, but he was not getting billed for them. Clicking on ‘his’ ads (you can do that if you are an advertiser I guess!) took him to his website. Not unreasonably, he asks #*$!?

All I can think of is someone has targeted his site (a very non-tecchy subject) on the basis that his users are more likely than average to have vulnerable PCs.

So, a click on the link takes users to a site that briefly checks the new arrival for vulns, loads any appropriate malware as a drive-by download, and transparently forwards the user to where he expected to be in the first place.

Question for the experts on this board. Is this possible? Because if it is, it can’t be anything but bad news for publishers and advertisers alike.

Opinions?