Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing a strange thing with the statistics reporting over at the Ancient Standard… the stats have been reporting more adsense clicks than my Google account was, and I’ve been noticing a lot of visits from blank pages of spam domains. I’ll have to admit, I’m a bit slow on the uptake, so it took me a while to surmise that something wasn’t quite right.
Last night I did a little searching and I found this page… I wasn’t able to find any other information about this exploit, but the words…
“This vulnerability reminds me of the the old Hacker movies, where a worm is released that steals random pennies from unsuspecting victims. This vulnerability is the closest I have seen to this scenario.”
…sounded way too much like what was happening with my stats / Adsense account discrepancy. So I’ve updated the script with the fix they posted, and I’m going to keep a close eye on things over the next few days and see if the discrepancy I was noticing on a daily basis is corrected now.
I hadn’t really heard anything about this vulnerability online or in the blogosphere, but I know Adsense Deluxe is used fairly widely, so this is something that could be potentially affecting many people. I also found no mention of this on the official Adsense Deluxe homepage, and the current version available for download seemed to be the exploitable version.
I’m lucky, the stats program I use just happens to track outgoing clicks as well as incoming referrers, something a lot of stats programs don’t do. If I hadn’t been tracking outgoing clicks, I would have had no idea anything was wrong!
If you’re using Adsense Deluxe, you really need to make sure you’re not suffering from this exploit!
Good Profits!
November 18th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
[…] other day, I mentioned a problem I’ve had with Adsense Deluxe on The Ancient Standard, and upgrading seems to have lessened […]