The fact that there are many slimy scammy bastards on the virtual world who prey for innocent victims isn’t new. It also isn’t new that they are succeeding to hide behind the giant legitimate web companies’ ads which dangerously makes them look legitimate by themselves.
But what is new, is that some of those giant web companies are now teaming up to battle against those creepy fu*ks.
The non-profit organization StopBadware, which basically targets all the internet evil forces (too melodramatic?), has announced on a partnership with few of the top ad-selling web companies – AOL, Facebook, Google, Twitter and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) – Which produced the Ads Integrity Alliance.
The obvious goal of the alliance is to fight evil advertisers and it will have three main roles:
- Create, develop and share policies, definitions and recommendations.
- Exchange information about known scammers, spammers and other online polluters.
- To Cooperate with policymakers and law enforcement agencies in order to execute legal actions.
All of the alliance’s web companies have already been battling this way or another with the internet dark players: Couple of months ago, Twitter filed a lawsuit against five individuals and companies for spamming its social networking platform and previously Facebook also took similar legal actions against a company which encouraged spam.
In addition, Google disclosed that in 2011 it had to ban over 130 million ads and to shut 800,000 advertiser accounts which participated in scam/fraud/malware activities. Moreover, Google alongside Microsoft and Yahoo have been working with federal law enforcements to fight mortgage scam ads. Speaking on Microsoft and Yahoo, their absence from the alliance is quite noticeable.
Of course the internet companies have their own financial self-interests to serve by joining and contributing to this alliance initiative: Less bad ads increases the general trust of users to click on ads and more legitimate advertisers feels confident in buying ads which obviously eventually leads to more ad revenue for the web companies.
In any case, if you have some bad experience online regarding malware in particular and you wish to share it with more people, StopBadware operates the forum BadwareBusters.org where you can share your story and find other malware reports.