I don’t know if the developer of this Trojan has lost their mind, but they created something that could be very crippling to the Google empire.  By creating a Trojan that replaces Google ads from another source, it is literally disabling one of Google’s primary income streams.  Chances are this Trojan will not last for long since Google has some of the smartest people in the world working for them, but if (well… when) they figure out who developed this, that person could be in some very deep sh*t…

A security company has identified a Trojan horse program that replaces Google text advertisements on Web pages with ads from another source, depriving Google of revenue and potentially causing problems for end users.

Google may be powerless to stop the trick since it involves the modification of an internal PC file, called the hosts file, that is used to match domain names of Web sites with IP (Internet protocol) addresses, said Romanian security company BitDefender.

When a person visits a Web site, the browser checks the hosts file to see if it has an IP address for a particular domain name. If the hosts file is corrupted or hijacked, the browser can be directed to fetch a different Web page than the one the user intended to.[more]

Tags: Malware