Mike On Ads

I’ve been quite a few emails about my ErrorSafe page, both from publisher and end-users, but not a single one from an ad-network. Interestingly I’ve gotten two separate comlaints about ErrorSafe on CareerBuilder.com. The first complaint I received was from April 22nd:

Just came across this information after receiving an odd message from drivecleaner.com. I was on Careerbuilder.com at the time, which doesn’t surprise me since my resume was “picked up” by some email scammers (phishing for SSN#s I guess) from that site recently. I have also been browsing EBay quite a bit lately. What exactly do I have to fear, as a consumer, from these heavy-traffic sites? I rarely click on the types of ads you have shown here, but now I NEVER will. I’ll just go directly to any website I want to visit. I work on an Apple MacBook,which I believe to be far less susceptible to viruses, and this drivecleaner showed up while I was browsing in Firefox. Any thoughts?

Then this morning, I received a second one:

Hello, I know very little about techie things, but i am on a mac and get the errorsafe messages on the careerbuilder website.

So, I thought I’d take a look, and sure enough what do I see?

Apologies for the crappy windows paint outlining but what you see there is a “mysurvey4u.com” ad on careerbuilder.com. If this name doesn’t ring a bell, I’ve already identified this as a fake front for running Errorsafe/Drivecleaner/Winfixer ads on my Errorsafe Page. Of course I have a tracer open, and what do we see? (Displayed URLs edited for clarity)

14:03:40.937[344ms][total 344ms] Status: 200[OK] GET http://oascentral.careerbuilder.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_sx.ads/careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker[...]

14:03:41.640[375ms][total 375ms] Status: 200[OK] GET http://a248.e.akamai.net/[...]/oascentral-s.realmedia.com/RealMedia/[...]/Mysurveys_Burnads_120_ROS_Jul07[...]

Now I”m mostly guessing here, but it looks to me like CareerBuilder is hosting this creative themselves using 24/7 RealMedia’s Open Adstream adserver. Looking at the URL I’m going to guess that the creative for MySurvey4U was supplied by “BurnAds” — which from their website appears to be yet another online advertising/marketing/ad-network.

If you happen to have a contact at CareerBuilder they could probably use a little education on ad-safety.