Kaspersky Security Application Flagging Google Adsense As Malware

A recent Kaspersky antivirus software update accidentally listed Google's Adsense advertising solution as a malicious script, causing confusion and inconvenience to many.

Google Adsense is widely used as an online advertisement platform by numerous legitimate but small websites on the internet.

It was reported that when a visitor, who has an activated Kaspersky antivirus software installed, accessed a web page with an Adsense advertisement on it, the security application would  flashed a message on the screen that warned the visitor against a Trojan virus that was supposed to be on the page, when in fact wasn’t.

Furthermore, depending on the settings applied by the user, Kaspersky software blocked the ‘affected’ pages, making them inaccessible.

However, the Russian antivirus company, acknowledging the false alert issued by its popular software, issued a statement along with a patch that fixes the problem.

Te statement admitted the mistake and mentioned “Kaspersky Lab would like to apologize for any inconvenience this problem may have caused users. The company is continually improving its procedures for testing products and releasing updates to prevent such errors from occurring in future.”

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The company reported that the problem occurred when an incorrect signature was added to the company’s database which led to Kaspersky products blocking legitimate websites that contained the Google Adsense script.