I have received communication from Clicksor today in responce to one of my recent posts and issues I have experienced on one of my websites associated with Clicksor ads. I have to say that I may have been a little to harsh on Clicksor. They did investigate the issue and have take actions.
This morning I received and e-mail from a support team at Clicksor containing following:
Hi Vlodymyr,
Sorry for the delayed reply as our audit team has been analyzing ad campaigns that could have led to the indicated pop-up. We have located the source of this drivecleaner ad and the code provided by the advertiser is shown below:
I will omit the code just saying that the code was associated with a banner ad and the “hacker-advertiser” managed to squeeze a PHP file instead of an image file. This PHP file has executed and installation of certain “Drive Cleaner “ on computers of many visitors to one of my website’s.
Note: due to privacy policy, we cannot disclosure the domain name of the advertiser.
As you can see the <img> tag in the code, this is a .php file and not a .jpg, .gif, .jpeg file. Even though we have examined the ad banner, the advertiser was able to change the code after we have audited and approved it.
The e-mail goes on saying that Clicksor have never reciewed my e-mail, this may have been my fault since I used one of the contact forms on the website instead of opening a ticket:
We have read your blog posting; however, we did not receive any email from your registered email (vjsolutions@optonline.net). We regret that we were unable to provide you with immediate assistance. Other than email, you may call or send trouble ticket to our representatives and we will surely provide support to you as soon as your inquiry is received.
We hope that you could understand our position as we try our best to ensure all ad campaigns are in good quality by continuous auditing. However, due to setup issues on the advertisers’ side, we sometimes encounter this type of issues. In additional to our auditing, with the information provided by our publishers, we will be able to eliminate any illegal ad campaigns in our network.
Sending the message via web form may have been a mistake on my part. But I do question the purpose of such forms. So learn from Clicksor mistake, take down any “contact form” that is not working properly. Otherwise you are in danger to make your customer look stupid (sorry I simply can’t find a better word). Just for the record I did use the contact form and am not making it up. I have no reason to.
Although e-mail came short of true customer support, I am impressed they took some kind of action. I e-mailed Clicksor back thanking them for taking an attempt to investigate the issue and requested to cancel my account. I did that because I value my visitors and would not like to expose their computers to any kind of security issues.
I wish that the very first e-mail from Clicksor began something like this:
Dear Vlad,
We are terribly sorry to hear you had this issue. To make sure we care about our reputation and the reputation of our publishers we have found the advertiser at fault and have terminated our relationship with advertiser in question……….
Very bad damage control on Clicksor part. And of course I do hope they have learned a lesson. Every time an ad is modified it should be re-approved before going life.
Finally just moments ago I have received following e-mail:
Dear Volodymyr,
Your Publisher Account (id: ******) has been disabled as request. The advertiser has been removed from our network as soon as we notice about this issue. May you please provide our response on your blog posting? Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any further question or concern regarding this matter.
Thank you for your understanding in this issue.
Have a great weekend.
Regards,
Ada
Account Management Team
I do wish Clicksor apologized for the entire incident. They only apologized for the delay in responding due to investigation delay. Nice job to make your customer’s look and feel impertinent! Great job!