Google's AdSense programme has been the subject of attacks from a Trojan, an antivirus firm has announced.According to BitDefender, the virus, dubbed Trojan.Qhost.WU, modifies infected computers' hosts file and redirects the Google AdSense link to a different address.
AdSense is an ad-serving programme which allows website owners to enable text, image and video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google.
Commenting on the threat to the application, BitDefender virus analyst Attila-Mihaly Balazs stated: "This is a serious situation that damages users and webmasters alike.
"Users are affected because the advertisements and/or the linked sites may contain malicious code, which is a very likely situation given that they are promoted using malware in the first place."
Meanwhile, webmasters are hit because the Trojan takes away viewers and, consequently, a possible source of revenue from their websites, he added.
Responding to the situation, Google commented: "We have cancelled customer accounts that display ads redirecting users to malicious sites or that advertise a product violating our software principles," Reuters reports.
Google actively works to detect and remove sites that serve malware in both its search results and its ad network, it added.
Last month, the search engine provider was affected by a web hijacking campaign in which malicious websites used by hijackers would come up in search results when users typed in innocuous terms such as "hospice".
