Adsense Filtered URL list.

As you may or may not know, icrontic.com is a member of the ASAP, the Alliance of Security Analysis Professionals.

As such, we are held to a high degree of integrity and responsibility to the internet community at large.

As part of our work, we offer free assistance to those in need of spyware removal, through our Spyware, Virus, and Trojan discussion forum. Anybody who is having a spyware problem can come here, post a log, and get help removing spyware from their system.

As you also may know, a site as large as ours costs a lot of money to host. Our bandwidth bills are high, and as such, we needed to create an income from the site to mitigate this cost. After a lot of deliberation, we chose Google AdSense ads for this purpose. The primary reason we chose them is because they are out of the way, text-based, and unobtrusive. They are also context-based, which means they are targeted to the audience based on what is in that particular forum.

One unintended side effect of this has been the proliferation of "junk spyware remover" ads. There are many, many "spyware removers" out there, but only a handful of them are legitimate and useful. The rest are either useless, or even worse, may actually be malicious themselves. Luckily for us, there are people out there that care enough to try to keep on top of these things. SpywareWarrior maintains a list of rogue and useless spyware removal products. As you can see, many of the companies that push their useless junk on us use Google to advertise their wares. This creates a strange situation for us, because we are here to remove spyware, yet we are sometimes unintentionally carrying advertisers of junk products.

Luckily, Google provides a mechanism to filter out URLs of advertisers that you don't want on your site (such as competitors). Therefore, we are able to add junk advertisers to the filter list when they come up.

As a service to the anti-spyware community, I have decided to maintain a list of known junkware advertisers for site owners and users of google adsense. Site owners can simply cut and paste this list into their URL filter section of their Adsense account to prevent ads for these pushers of junk on their sites.

This list was developed in conjunction with Paperghost at VitalSecurity.org as well as computerguy at thatcomputerguy forums. Thanks to Maddoktor2 at Spyware Beware for providing the foundation for us to develop helpful tools like these.

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Note to advertisers: If your site appears on this list, and you feel that it should not be, please PM me with your reason.