Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Good ol' Krebs and Schneier ..either way too late to a scam, or ignoring other scams, or ineffectual regardless. What about those fake "download here" Adword buttons that have been a scourge of the web for the past decade or longer infecting untold millions of computers with malware. When will anyone bring that up.

View on HN

A good takeaway from this is that

1) the simplest methods can stick around the longest. His skimmer page is 13 years old and it's still relevant, for example. Similarly, we will not be rid of fake download buttons or compromised wordpress sites in our lifetimes.

2) If you write about the simple stuff, your articles will be evergreen. You don't have to time the market when your product never falls out of demand.

Google can simply decline to run any ad which has the words "download here" as an image. how hard is that? I guess people do not come forward and less media coverage, unlike crypto losses and scams.

People have been bringing that up for like a decade?

Not sure if it's exactly the same thing as what you just mentioned, but I did write recently about criminals using paid Google ads to get their links for popular software downloads show up before even the first organic search result. And it includes the right icons and branding, and people click and are brought to a site that looks an awful lot like a site Microsoft might use to let you download Teams, and you get an information stealer program instead.

Tl;dr, there are multiple ransomware groups that are using this method to find new infostealer victims.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/09/snatch-ransom-group-expo...

Too bad Google seems to always be behind the curve on stopping this . Fake wallets and other scams on AdWords and Google Play store

Are people at Google even manually reviewing any of this? They have so many people there you would imagine it's not an impossible thought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com