“The ad is malicious, despite specifying the "bestbuy.com" domain clearly”

plus.google.com

25 points·ocdtrekkie··7 comments

My guess is that it's using substituting one or more of the letters for some look-alike character out of the extended unicode character set. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

There could also be an open redirect in bestbuy.com somewhere which is exploited

ｂestbuy.com < homograph domain resolves apparently to the right domain.

Here is a generator you can fiddle with http://www.irongeek.com/homoglyph-attack-generator.php

Maybe you can find one.

I'm a little mystified, as I have a general standing advice to recommend to people to look at the URL line in search (which is green on Google search pages) to verify the domain of the destination is correct, rather than trusting the title. But this ad appears to successfully pretend to be bestbuy.com

I thought in ads the ad publisher can specify what appears there, so they can redirect you through external ad tracking services etc and still show their normal domain? (Can't find a reference for that right now, but that's what I remember from previous discussions about misleading ads)

Of course Google should validate those somehow, but it seems not unlikely someone could cheat that process.

I believe this is correct. I recently setup an adword for the first time, and remember being confused/shocked that I could specify whatever I wanted for the display URL, which had no bearing on the linked URL.

Think this is not showing up now - seeing bestbuy.com in the URL bar as well for the ad.

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