14 DAY TRIAL // Google's advertising division has announced they plan to crack down on ad injectors after they've received over 300,000 complaints from Chrome users and online advertisers this year alone.
Google's AdWords program was started in 2000, but it was not the first of its kind. Previous online advertising existed many years before, and so did ad injectors.
If the term is new to you, an ad injector is a technique through which malicious actors replace ads on existing pages with their own or load new ads in places where they did not previously exist.
For many years, ad injectors have been distributed via browser toolbars, but in recent years, their owners started bundling them with browser extensions.
While at first ad injectors were used solely for monetary gains, in recent years, cyber-security firms have seen a rise in ad injection scripts being used to distribute malware.
In the past, injected ads appeared on Apple's website
Some of the most famous ad injectors seen in the past include Adware Sambreel, which inserted ads on YouTube, and Rewards Arcade which was seen on the websites of Apple, Walmart, Dropbox, and Facebook. It's worth mentioning that Apple has never shown ads on its website, which made the entire campaign stand out right away.
According to extensive research carried out by Google, ad injectors do not only affect a user's experience on a site but also disrupt the normal operations of a content publisher, which cannot control the amount of ads delivered to readers, and online advertisers, which suffer financial losses due to losing ad impressions.
While Google has been well aware of this issue for so many years, the company never did anything drastic about it, which is mind-boggling since the activity of ad injectors also affects its bottom line as well.
Introducing a new automated filter in the DoubleClick Bid Manager
To counteract the damages ad injectors are doing, Google has finally announced some protection measures, a new automated filter in DoubleClick Bid Manager, which will remove ad impressions generated by ad injectors.
Advertisers don't need to change any settings, and this filter will automatically remove ads that ad injectors have compromised in the past to serve their own advertising instead.
Currently, Google is reporting that 1.4% of the ads from its DoubleClick Bid Manager repository have been banned due to suspicions of ad injections since the new filter was turned on a few weeks back.