Google continues to struggle with cybercriminals running malicious ads on its search platform to trick people into downloading booby-trapped copies of popular free software applications. The malicious ads, which appear above organic search results and often precede links to legitimate sources of the same software, can make searching for software on Google a dicey affair.
We keep saying that blocking ads is a security feature, and it keeps being true.
Yes especially since Google is making it harder to spot the ads among legitimate content now :(
You nowadays even need to pay attention on Android as you might get an “software related to what you’re currently trying to install” with an install button on top of the install button you want - in the location where the install button used to be in googles playstore. Whoever came up with that stupid idea needs their computer privileges revoked for the rest of their life.
Whoever came up with that stupid idea needs their computer privileges revoked for the rest of their life.
Wish granted: that person is now the CEO of AdSense and has a dozen EA’s to handle their computer for them.
Wait whatt? Can you share a screenshot?
On Windows, use Winget and/or Chocolatey to download your software when possible. There’s an unofficial site at https://winget.run/ that lets you browse all available Winget packages.
Microsoft store is good too, but not everything is listed there.
Winget and/or Chocolatey and/or Scoop
WingetUI supports them all: https://github.com/marticliment/WingetUI
Btw, winget: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Yeah.
rant
What’s ironic, is that so many years later (what’s it been, 10 already?), Chocolatey’s “inferior approach”, even competing against now “Microsoft’s own” Winget, ends up with more failed updates on the Winget team than the Choco team. Which just goes to show what everyone has been saying from the beginning: that the core problem is, and has always been, on the installer side, not so much on the package manager side.
At least Vista has solved the “DLL hell” problem, maybe in another 10 years some future Windows will have an installer experience similar to Linux from 10 years ago. Powertoys somewhat recently introduced a “what’s using this file” tool… maybe that’s a step in the right direction towards noticing the need for a CoW approach to open files, or is that just wishful thinking? 🙄
But it remains a mystery why Google has not similarly blocked more the 240+ other domains at this same host, or else removed them from its search index entirely. Especially considering there is nothing else but these domains hosted at that Netherlands IP address, and because they have all remained at that address for the past year.
They get paid to leave them up. Mystery: solved.
This is the most “no sh*rt Sherlock!” Article headline I’ve read all day.
this isn’t anything new. fake downloads, malware, and scam support sites and links and phone numbers have been a thing in results since they started putting paid placements and ads in serp… and even before then, back when simple keyword spam could game the algorithms.
Title should be: Downloading software from internet can be risky.
