Google’s DoubleClick ad network has once again been caught distributing malicious banner displays, this time on the home page of eWeek.

Unsuspecting end users who browse the Ziff Davis Enterprise Holdings-owned site were presented with malvertisements with invisible iframes that redirect them to attack websites, according to researchers at Websense. The redirects use one of two methods to infect users with malware, including rogue anti-virus software.

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Grifters are using Facebook to lend credibility to an elaborate get rich quick scam designed to trick punters into handing over credit card details.

The ruse begins with an ad on Facebook touting an offer to “get paid for posting links – Google will pay you great money for doing this”. Users who respond to the come-on by clicking on a link are taken to a page where someone who’s supposedly become rich through the scheme relates his story.

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Ask.com is prepping Google-like malware warnings – though it hopes to leave out the bit where the Oompa Loompa accidentally blocks access to the entire internet.

Early Saturday morning Pacific time, someone inside the Mountain View Chocolate Factory accidentally added a wildcard to the search engine’s master list of potentially harmful sites, and for about an hour, Google’s main search engine steered people clear of every site on the net.

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Google has leapfrogged Microsoft to reach third place in a blacklist of spam-friendly ISPs, compiled by anti-spam organisation Spamhaus.org

Microsoft, which cropped up at fifth place on the November edition of the same list, has cleaned up its act to the extent that it no longer appears in the rogues’ gallery of the ten ISPs that are slackest in dealing with junk mail problems. Previously Microsoft’s live.com and livefilestore.com web properties were soft targets for penis pill purveyors, advance fee fraudsters and other junk mail swine, but this has changed over the last month or so.

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