Virus for your adsense !!!

A new virus that infiltrates Google's online advertising business and hijacks the ads with a different provide has been detected, Romanian antivirus company BitDefender says.

The trojan – dubbed Trojan.Qhost.WU – modifies the infected computers' hosts file and redirect the Google's AdSense link "page2.googlesyndication.com" to a different address.

"This is a serious situation that damages users and webmasters alike," said Attila-Mihaly Balazs, a BitDefender virus analyst.

“Users are affected because the advertisements and/or the linked sites may contain malicious code, which1 is a very likely situation, given that they are promoted using malware in the first place," he said. "Webmasters are affected because the trojan takes away viewers and thus a possible money source from their websites.”

Google reacted swiftly, cancelling the AdSense accounts that it linked to the malicious threat.

"We have cancelled customer accounts that display ads redirecting users to malicious sites or that advertise a product violating our software principles," a Google spokesperson told Reuters.

While BitDefender labels the virus as spreading at a "low" level and Google containing the threat, online users who wish to ensure they're Trojan.Qhost.WU-free should visit here to clean your system.

All this for a virus that's only 2048 bytes, or two-thousandth's of a megabyte.

JenSense reports that we got ourselves Malicious software that targets Google AdSense ads. She explains;

"A new trojan horse discovered by an Indian publisher replaces Google AdSense ads with their own ads, advertising sites including dating, sex, viagra and weight loss. This trojan is very recent, because it not only converts regular AdSense ad units, but also the Google AdSense and Firefox referrer buttons into text links."

JenSense continues by saying that there was no reports of this affecting YPN ads. In addition, Techshout has pictures showing the very similar visual appears of these ads when compared to Google AdSense ads.