Seeing ads on Wikipedia? Then you're infected
Click fraudsters are milking you for cash
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Surfers who see ads when they visit Wikipedia are likely infected with malware, the online encyclopedia warns.
Wikipedia relies on donations to fund its work, resisting the temptation to put ads on its pages. So internet users who see commercial ads when they visit the encyclopedia are been served content via cybercrime affiliates, a blog post by Wikipedia explains.
We never run ads on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is funded by more than a million donors, who give an average donation of less than 30 dollars. We run fundraising appeals, usually at the end of the year.If you're seeing advertisements for a for-profit industry (see screenshot for an example) or anything but our fundraiser, then your web browser has likely been infected with malware.
Wikipedia doesn't warn over any specific malware but rather about the symptoms of click fraud, one of they more common ways that virus writers turn an illicit profit. The approach was used as the business model behind the infamous Flashback Trojan, which notoriously created a huge botnet on Mac machines until Apple belatedly patched the Java vulnerability that the malware had exploited. Cupertino released a clean-up tool earlier this week.
An updated analysis by Symantec, published on Wednesday, reveals that over a three-week period in April, the botnet displayed over 10 million ads on compromised computers. "Approximately 400,000 of those ads were clicked on, which would have netted the attackers $14,000 if they were able to collect it," an anonymous Symantec researcher explains. "Many PPC providers employ anti-fraud measures and affiliate-verification processes before paying. Fortunately, the attackers in this instance appear to have been unable to complete the necessary steps to be paid.
"It is estimated the actual ad-clicking component of Flashback was only installed on about 10,000 of the more than 600,000 infected machines. In other words, utilising less than 2 per cent of the entire botnet the attackers were able to generate $14,000 in three weeks, meaning that if the attackers were able to use the entire botnet, they could potentially have earned millions of dollars a year," Symantec adds. ®
COMMENTS
Re: I have a serious question:
Their business, their choice. If you're not happy take your business elsewhere.
Personally I'd rather the cash went to wikipedia rather than google.
Re: I have a serious question:
I' sure back in its day that Britanica could have been cheaper if it too had had adverts, but fortunately both Britianica and Wikipedia have realised they're encylopedias, not glossy magazines or tabloids newspapers and that ads aren't really appropriate and they're a better product without them.
I also think that people might be less inclined to donate time to contributing to articles if they were faced with ads when doing so. Certainly my own reaction would be along the lines of "I'm trying to help out here and you're trying to take advantage of that and sell me crap? Feck off!"
Re: traffic
idiot.
That is the whole point of donations vs adverts. I have donated (a whopping £5 last year) simply because I use it a lot and DONT get bombed with adverts. There are other sites I use that I wish had this approach, I would much rather donate to some sites that see adverts.
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