Not an issue Are these really the sort of ads, the site wants?

[Nuadormrac]

When visiting the WoW gold thread in the games section

http://www.osnn.net/pc-gaming/99856...e-i-can-get-reliable-wow-gold.html#post873131

I noticed it wasn't just the 1 post spammer who tried to link, probably their own spamvertized website; but it was some of the Google ads which are spitting out some of these links. It showed on the top ad space

<LI id=taw0 onmouseover="ss('','aw0')" onfocus="ss('','aw0')">Buy Cheap & Safe Gold $3+

24Hr Live Support 5-15 Min Delivery US Business, 600+ Reviews Fast Safe
Forsaken-Farmers - Real People, Real Powerleveling! Setting the Service Standard since 2007! | Forsaken-Farmers.com

<LI id=taw1 onmouseover="ss('','aw1')" onfocus="ss('','aw1')">Cheap World Gold $5/10000 <30 Mins Delivery, 100% Fully Stock Buy Cheap World Gold Try Us Buy Now

• 
  

Now the only bit I removed was the links to the sites they were advertizing (they have enough exposure without providing them more, even if it is to point out that the forums are themselves linking some of these sites up), but otherwise it is as is getting advertized through google ads. However, there are other links (embeded in the text) which would take more alterations to remove, while still presenting exactly what is getting put up by the server ad software itself.

Is this really the sort of ad you want to use, for purposes of collecting ad revenue for the site? Or might you want to stop those particular ads from comming through. Now I know some of those ad applets can be a bit context sensitive, and a thread about WoW might trigger that. But that said, it isn't necessarily the sort of ad you want to present/activity you want to officially condone given it's a violation of Blizzard's ToS to do business with these people?

The bottom of the page also had another ad

<LI id=taw0 onmouseover="ss('','aw0')" onfocus="ss('','aw0')">Cheap World Gold $5/10000 <30 Mins Delivery, 100% Fully Stock Buy Cheap World Gold Try Us Buy Now

 

[Johnny]

Now that is funny ...

 

[Electronic Punk]

Context ad victory

 

[LordOfLA]

Just zapped the thread. Firefox decided I'd post to a different tab though....

 

[Electronic Punk]

Zapped it with what?

 

[LordOfLA]

one of those awesome lasers from wickedlasers.com?

 

[Nuadormrac]

Ya know, I don't know if their ads might have had anything to do with it, or what was going on; but after I installed win7 on this computer, and posted to the win7 forum thread, I had one hell of a bad experience with these gold sellers. I'm still somewhat stunned by the whole thing.

The day in question, I did a partition, format, and clean install of win7 on this laptop's internal drive. The extranal drive was largely left as such (it has my data), though I had Kaspersky on the old install and it had no gripes previously.

So that night, I posted, and otherwise pretty much only grabed a few updates like Adobe reader and the like, did run Windows Update, and deleted the whole WoW directory, and did a fresh download from the accounts page. I also re-downloaded all patches straight from Blizzard, got all the addons through the curse client, and went and played. Didn't expect anything funky on a fresh install.

I was rather shocked following day, when I went to login, and my password wouldn't work, and trying to get to the accounts page on battle.net, couldn't. Checked email, and was hit with a temp suspension for gold selling activities WTF? I'd had the game over 4 years, nothing of the sort, Bliz suspected my acct was hijacked, I first thought there was an error, I'm not a gold seller, well until I got in my account. All my gear was vendored, banks empty, bags empty, gold gone. There were lvl 1 chars on my friend's lists I never heard the names to before, I had chars deleted, and 1 bliz spoof like name on a realm I never played on. It was a royal mess.

I had to go through the process of trying to contact bliz, but before I coudl get ahold of anyone to find out wtf was going on, got hit with another temp suspension latter in the day. Being unable to get ahold of anyone, fast enough to intercept whatever was going on, and get to the bottom of it, I finally sent email off to the account management team to inquire in all this, and to notify I had obviously been hacked, but on a fresh format/install I just don't understand how this happened. I hadn't really been on the web much.

But then when I browsed to this forum again through Google, instead of a redirect, I got a big warning message from Google about instances of trojans being unknowningly uploaded to people's computers had been reported to them, and Google was advising against following the URL. Wouldn't have been my expectation of sites to have problems with malware uploads But not knowing how to contact admins off site, and not wanting to, well I'd stayed away a lil.

In any case, I grabed a new download of Kaspersky (OK, after 8-10 hours of installing software I was tired, and just wanted to do something else. I only visited Windows update, a few sites like adobe.com for program downloads, battle.net to login and get the game client, and this site, I didn't expect with that being the extent of my web activity I'd have a prob that day). It detected the game thief trojan on the computer, and also had flagged aion.bin as a trojan.

After I got squared away with Blizzard, and got my characters/items restored, I went to login to Aion during Blizzard's shutdown last week, to find that password not working either. Ironically since the install, I hadn't been logged into that account at all, it was just in the old directory structure form the external drive, having not been used in months. When support was convinced it was my account, they did a password reset, then escalated it to the account review board (apperently whoever hijacked it, got it banned, I'm gathering the same thing, gold selling on a stolen account).

Yeah, these people are bad news, and definitely not something one wants in their ads. I have no idea what happened that day, only that I got hacked, and with no sense, the only thing reported out of the ordinary was when Google gave a warning about some history of trojans over the past 60 days on some hits here

The guild master to my orc's guild (had to explain why I might not be able to make ICC raid I was signed up for, when this all hit, on account I can't raid nakey) said that perhaps these people are getting clever. They know gamers would visit tech sites, so if they want to create problems to help steal accounts/assist their gold selling business... But she never did get why she ended up with a trojan from visiting a dog training site of all things. Someone else suggested that there might have been some hidden code in one of the ads, people wouldn't have known about.

Perhaps something to check into, just to make sure things are clean... Though with these gold sellers in the specific, wouldn't put it past them. I can say, after having had this whole ordeal following a clean install, yes these gold sellers are the same as many of these hackers, who would be up to no good in that regard. I'm still rather surprised though, that right on a fresh install, (not the old install on some used computer which had been just about everywhere on the Internet), is where I should have had my first run in with those thieves Right after all that though, I would like to see susanexpress and co. get the sorta treatment Mr. Rawlsky got after he bragged about his ability to send 1 billion spam emails per day

Well anyhow, a slight heads up, on the time of my last visit here, just in case there is something to keep an eye on...