Anti-malvertising campaign hailed

A campaign by Google to rid the web of adverts that lead to malware has been praised.

Security experts said that the Anti-Malvertising.com campaign was a positive step from the web giant, whose advertising platform AdSense provides ads for thousands of websites.

Cybercriminals have been known to place advertisements on the AdSense platform that link directly to infected websites, risking the security of anyone who clicks on them.

Nearly 46,000 attacks that used this method were spotted last year by security firm Kaspersky.

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Another security firm, Finjan, praised Google's plan to "help individuals and businesses make better-informed decisions to protect against cybercriminal threats", saying that the threat from 'malvertising' was growing.

"With the automation of crimeware, the rise in all malicious code will increase exponentially and endanger both an advertiser's brand as well as their customer's PCs," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technical officer of Finjan.