Occasionally I visit websites and see a “please disable AdBlock for our site” or general complaints about the horrors of an advertising-free web. But when even Google can’t keep malware out of its ad network, asking me to unblock ads that I’m never going to click on to help your business model is absurd.
After some digging, researcher Jerome Segura realized the problem was coming from Google’s DoubleClick ad servers and the popular Zedo ad agency. Together, they were serving up malicious ads designed to spread the recently identified Zemot malware. A Google representative has confirmed the breach, saying “our team is aware of this and has taken steps to shut this down.”