Google serving sponsored link to Homebrew site clone with malware

Re:Google serving sponsored link to Homebrew site clone with... by bcye on Monday January 20, 2025 @09:17AM (#42768963)

I don't get what non-malicious reason there would be for not automatically verifying domain ownership of display urls as an advertising network. The advertiser is highly likely to already have a Search Console account in which they'd have had to verify it, and URL verification is easily done by all kinds of systems via meta tags, CNAME or TXT entries, etc. Why not for ads?

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Re:Google serving sponsored link to Homebrew site clone with... by iambateman on Monday January 20, 2025 @09:25AM (#42769036)

Well… marketing and web development are often at war with one another inside individual organizations.

And the person running the ads almost never has domain-verification authority.

So Google doesn’t want to introduce a major barrier to accept money. I think that makes sense without being malicious.

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Re:Google serving sponsored link to Homebrew site clone with... by bcye on Monday January 20, 2025 @09:30AM (#42769080)

The attack vector for scams seems immediately apparent, so this just seems very negligent.

It also reduces the risk for advertisers as the profit from taking over an ad account is less if you can't direct users to malware from an account with good standing (of course there are still other ways to show malicious ads).

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Re:Google serving sponsored link to Homebrew site clone with... by compootr on Monday January 27, 2025 @10:51PM (#42848655)

I mean, Google is incentivized here to reduce friction on advertisers instead of protecting losses they wouldn't even incur from a malicious ad

in other words, a malicious ad doesn't do much for them but actively increasing security is bad. yay capitalism

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