The Adult Webmaster

Adwords Account Cracked by Extagen Affiliate

Logged into my Google Adwords account this morning to find a shocking situation unfolding.

Apparently someone was able to crack into my account 2 days ago and set up a rogue ad campaign. The campaign they started was focused on “extagen” keywords and had a daily spend limit of $900! The max CPC was set at $100 on each keyword! Over the course of 2 days they were able to run up $490 in ad clicks (39 clicks total).

I immediately paused the campaign, then changed my password in Google Accounts. Then I sent an email to Google support, informing them of my compromised account situation.

I then checked out the link that the hacker had been sending all of the clicks to - xhttp://www.extagenshop.com … apparently he was just using this domain to iframe his sponsor xhttp://www.extagencapsules.com/a/alexdesign9 … so I went to the sponsors contact page and reported this rogue affiliate to them.

After contacting the two parties who profited off this, I then logged back into my adwords account and noticed that the campaign had been un-paused. Thoughts of keystroke loggers danced through my head as I imagined that was the only way someone could get my password so quickly. I then realized there was another one of my Google account with access to my adwords account, so I went and changed the password for it as well.

When I came back to my adwords campaign summary page I noticed that every one of my adwords campaigns had been “deleted.” The way adwords works though, even a deleted campaign is still completely visible, so no data is lost. I checked out the rogue campaign again and noticed that the hacker had apparently changed his destination URL as to cover his tracks to some degree. Then I checked out his domain again, only to find a completly blank slate… no html, no iframe, nada. This being at the most, 10 minutes after I made my initial reports.

One Response to “Adwords Account Cracked by Extagen Affiliate”

1. VexXxeD Says:
   June 2nd, 2007 at 5:55 pm

   Just reported extagenshop.com to their hosting provider http://www.estdomains.com/ … hopefully they cancel this clowns account.

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