AdBrite Having Problems

April 11th, 2007 by Chris

One of the perpetual risks you will run into when using smaller ad networks is that they are more prone to infiltration by spyware/trojan/virus drive-by-download advertisers. You may think this has to do with their lack of ability to filter such crap out. In reality though I think it has to do with their willingness to moreso look the other way, if they had people manually approving ads and working with advertisers this wouldn’t happen.

On my one site that uses Adbrite I’ve had numerous people, mostly UK residents, end up with these problems, although I myself had my anti-virus filter triggered once. This has been going on for weeks.

I’ve gotten one response from them about it:

We apologize for the ongoing perpetuation of unauthorized advertisements, such as drivecleaner.com, systemdoctor.com, or errorsafe.com in our network. We would like to notify you that in order to achieve a thorough and lasting resolution to this issue we have tightened restrictions around the submission of ad copy, begun scanning all advertisements for potential abuse, and forged partnerships with established anti-spyware and internet security companies to ensure detection and removal of these ads. Locating offending advertisers unfortunately continues to pose several difficulties. To that extent, if you are still experiencing problems with any advertisements that you believe to be abusing our network, we would appreciate any information you could provide about these ads, particularly the following:

But that was last week and this week its worse than ever.

If you use Adbrite check your site out, and you might want to suspend the ad serving until they get this fixed.

No related posts.

Posted in: Ad Networks »  by: Chris

11 Responses to “AdBrite Having Problems”

  1. Philip Kaplan  Says:
    April 11th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    Hi,

    These problems were caused by advertisers with Flash banners. We have since removed the ability for advertisers to upload Flash banners.

  2. Chris  Says:
    April 11th, 2007 at 10:03 am

    I’ve seen it on pages without flash, as well, I’ve gotten reports as recently as this morning from users.

  3. Fredrik Gyllensten  Says:
    April 11th, 2007 at 1:37 pm

    I’ve had the same problem several times! So i’ve had to change the settings so that I manually have to approve every ad. A bit more

  4. matt  Says:
    April 20th, 2007 at 7:40 am

    For the third time in about 3 months, drive cleaner is being installed on my site via adbrite.

    Huge problem.

  5. Frank  Says:
    May 8th, 2007 at 8:30 pm

    It has been happening on my site as well, and there are only text ads from Adbrite. I’ve suspended network ads for now and will probably be cancelling my Adbrite account very soon.

    It’s not like I was making any money from them anyway.

    -F

  6. Mike Nolet  Says:
    July 4th, 2007 at 11:55 am

    I’ve documented the scam here — http://www.mikeonads.com/what-is-errorsafe-and-how-do-we-stop-it/

  7. Tim Linden  Says:
    July 27th, 2007 at 10:42 am

    I’ve seen this happen with a site using Adbrite as recently as this week. 3 Months should be long enough to fix the problem..

  8. Tom Bluewater  Says:
    August 18th, 2007 at 11:22 pm

    Hello. We’ve been forced to remove all AdBrite’s ad codes. And we’ve recorded a documentation video involving AdBrite and DriveCleaner.

  9. 2008ouch  Says:
    February 18th, 2008 at 2:43 pm

    Today I got a virus detection on my avg from going to a site that had adbrite ads pop up. This is spooky since I saw the date on the post and it is sure still going on. I then went to check back and the page was down but, the site had hundreds of viewing it prior to adbrite taking it down.

    Just a warning on the net junk. Too many kids with nothing to do trying to ruin the net is a bad thing. What a shame they do not instead decide to use their knowledge to try to help fight virus problems instead of creating them. :(

  10. Steve  Says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 7:45 pm

    I use adbrite, but i like it

  11. q  Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 10:20 pm

    put adbrite on my site, went to site to see how it looked (did not click on anything at all) and then got the nastiest virus i had ever seen. after multiple attempts to get rid of it (anti virus, safe mode, remote assistant) my computer totally crashed less then 48 hours later. it was quite ridiculous. needless to say they arent on my site anymore

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