04 Feb 2015
Google blocked 524 million 'bad ads' and 250,000 malware sites in 2014
by Alastair Stevenson 04 Feb 2015
Google blocked a staggering 524 million 'bad ads' and removed 250,000 sites for spreading malware in 2014, marking a 50 percent increase on 2013.
Vikaram Gupta, Google's director of ads engineering, warned that the networks and ads were spreading a variety of different malware types.
"Overall, we disabled more than 524 million bad ads and banned more than 214,000 advertisers in 2014," he said in a Google Inside Ads blog post.
"To protect the safety and security of our users, we stop all ads pointing to sites where we find malware, whether it's spyware, adware or other types of malicious software.
Google removed 350 million bad ads in 2013, and the growth over 2014 underlines the threat that this form of malware spreading poses to web users.
As part of its work to stamp out these adverts, Google removed 250,000 sites from its network for hiding forms of malware in adverts and banned 214,000 advertisers.
Despite these efforts, is it clear that those behind such scams are committed to this form of malware. Gupta said that Google has seen an improvement in the technicality and tactics used in the malicious attacks over the past year.
"Our systems learn from incidents like these, helping us more effectively catch and remove bad ads and advertisers," he said.
"This is a constantly evolving fight. Bad actors continually create more sophisticated systems and scams, so we too are continually evolving our practices, technology and methodology in fighting these bad ads."
The stats follow warnings from the security community that hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities to force legitimate ad networks and sites to spread malware.
Bharat Mistry, cyber security consultant at Trend Micro, cited the recent wave of Adobe Flash zero-day vulnerabilities as an example of the type of flaws that can be exploited by advertisers.
"The [Flash] zero-days can easily be used for targeted attacks - typically done through 'malvertisements' which could be used as part of a broader watering hole attack - to target enterprise users visiting a topical or news-relevant site specific to their industry vertical or geographical region," he said.
Other vendors, such as Lookout, have reported an increase in bad ads targeting Google Android users.
There are concerns that the threats to Android will grow following Google's decision to cut patch security support for the WebView extension used in early versions of the OS.
Topics:
Security
Mobile Software
Google
Android
Hacking
cyber-crime
malware