Google – We Blocked 524 MILLION Bad Ads Last Year

Steve McCaskill,
malware blocked stop

Search giant also banned 214,000 advertisers and removed 250,000 sites in fight against malware

Google has revealed it blocked more malicious adverts than ever before during 2014, as the company’s fight against malware reached a whole new level.

The company said it blocked over 524 million ‘bad ads’ and removed 250,000 sites for spreading malware last year, a 50 percent increase on 2013 and its highest level ever.

It also blocked 214,000 advertisers in what proved to be a record-breaking year all round for fighting malware.

blog-google_search1Record

Vikaram Gupta, Google’s director of ads engineering, warned that criminals were now using a wider variety of malware than ever before.

“Overall, we disabled more than 524 million bad ads and banned more than 214,000 advertisers in 2014,” he said in a Google Inside Ads blog post.

“To protect the safety and security of our users, we stop all ads pointing to sites where we find malware, whether it’s spyware, adware or other types of malicious software.”

malwareProtected

However, Gupta was keen to point out that Google’s systems were also constantly evolving and improving to deal with this increasing number of threats.

“Our systems learn from incidents like these, helping us more effectively catch and remove bad ads and advertisers,” he said.

“This is a constantly evolving fight. Bad actors continually create more sophisticated systems and scams, so we too are continually evolving our practices, technology and methodology in fighting these bad ads.”

Last November, the Google announced it would be introducing a service that allows users to pay a nominal sum in exchange for the removal of advertisements from participating sites.

Google Contributor is intended to address user annoyance over pervasive advertising, and also concerns over ad tracking, since participating sites won’t track user behaviour, the company said.

Are you a Google expert? Take our quiz!