Google Research Reveals How Pervasive Adware Is on Your Computer
How to know if your computer is infected with the ad-based malware.
— -- Adware continues to be one of the most pervasive scams on the Internet, according to Google, which found more than five million computers infected with the malware.
The scam works by infecting a computer and then serving advertisements on new websites in an additional window that can more often than not be a pain to close. Scammers are able to exploit the scheme by collecting revenue for any ads that have been served.
Working with the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, Google looked at computers visiting the search engine from June to October 2014 to see if adware was being locally injected.
What they found were approximately 5.5 percent of the unique users accessed Google sites that included some version of the advertising malware.
"We pursued this research to raise awareness about the ad injection economy so that the broader ads ecosystem can better understand this complex issue and work together to tackle it," a Google post said.
Google said eradicating adware is important because it not only undermines the integrity of online advertising but it can also put users' computers at risk of a "man in the middle" attack and hijack their personal information.