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Anyone Ever Had Your Adwords Hacked?

by cscarpero
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I got a huge shock from Adwords today. I logged in and discovered that someone had added a campaign and charged $3900 on it! This happened in literally a couple of hours. Luckily my linked credit card has a low credit limit so even if Google bills it, it wll get declined.

Keep up with your Adwords and update those passwords.

I recently started using the Adwords Bulk Uploader. I wonder if it has a security hole or if that's just coincidence.
#adwords #hacked
  • Profile picture of the author Edgar Moreno
    Wow, I haven't checked my adwords account in ages. My campaign has had 0 impressions and 0 clicks, was hoping to have these forums help me change that.
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    • Profile picture of the author The Copy Nazi
      Banned
      I had Adwords hacked through my gmail a/c. And yeah - they set up a new campaign with a daily spend of €2k. I was using Tor - the open source proxy server - and I figured they got in through the "exit nodes" on it. I researched it and found that Tor is indeed easily cracked by hackers "phishing" for passwords. In a test at a blackhat forum earlier this year, a hacker demonstrated how he got 254 passwords in 24 hours hacking into Tor. Read about it here on my blog
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      • Profile picture of the author Tony Dean
        Tor was always notorious for Black Hat activity. I am surprised anyone would use it.
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        • Profile picture of the author Mark Brian
          Originally Posted by Tony Dean View Post

          Tor was always notorious for Black Hat activity. I am surprised anyone would use it.
          Yeah, I think it's pretty much designed for BH activities. If you're not gonna do anything bad, you don't need to hide right.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    Your Adwords account is just like any other account like your email account, PayPal, online bank account you have. Treat it as such.

    Don't divulge your login information. When hiring an Adwords account manager, only give them your ten-digit ID. That's all they need to link to your account and access only the data they need. Don't forget to remove their access once your contract is up. Maybe that's what happened to you. The vast majority of account managers are honest and will leave it alone, but why take chances. I ask former clients and remind them to remove my access or do it myself.

    Don't answer emails of any kind asking to login for whatever reason. This is a phising scam. Banks never send emails saying "there's a problem, please log in". Neither do credit card companies, PayPal, Google or any large and reputable company. Delete those emails and don't click on their links or you'll be sorry.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    > why would anybody want to set up an account on your Adwords?

    If you gave me your login to your Adwords account, I could go in and create a campaign for my own products. I'd be advertising for free on your dollar! Once access to your account, I could change the password so that you couldn't do a thing about it, except call Google and cancel the account I suppose. But you'd still be responsible for any costs I ran up.
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