Are Google Chrome's in-text ads from malware?

Question

Google Chrome on Windows double-underlines words on every page. On mouse hover I get an ad overlay from infolinks or similar. Is this a legit part of Windows Chrome or is it due to some kind of malware?

I understand that I can block these ads with an extension--I want to know why the ads are showing up in the first place. Isn't infolinks a competitor to Google's own AdSense??

Answer 1

If advertisements are showing up on top (or front) of Google's normal advertisements, then you definitely have SpyWare in your system. Use these two tools to get rid of nearly all SpyWare (sometimes you have to run them in Safe Mode to get rid of the SpyWare):

  SpyBot - Search & Destroy
  http://security.kolla.de/

  MalwareBytes.org
  http://www.malwarebytes.org/

These tools are free, and I've had excellent success with them. Of course, I encourage people to donate if they find these tools to be helpful.

Answer 2

Sorry to 'ressurect' this old topic, but I am posting my recent experience with this every place I can to try and raise awareness, and find solutions.

I, too, am suddenly seeing theses same underlined word links from something called "Infolinks". It is my Mac OS 10.6 at work, and I have installed nothing new on it. When I turned it off on Friday I was not having this issue. So what has happened between then and now? The only thing I can think of is that possibly Chrome, or one of it's extensions; being a work computer, it is set to automatically update.

My list of extensions is short, most of them being from Google themselves;

• Google Chrome 16.0.912.75
  • AddThis - Share & Bookmark (new) 2.9.2
  • Evernote Web Clipper 5.1.20.4691
  • Google +1 Button 1.1.2
  • Google Mail Checker 3.2
  • Google Reader Notifier (by Google) 1.3.1
  • Instapaper 1.2
  • Reader Plus 4.0.1
  • RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) 2.1.3
  • Shareaholic for Google Chrome™ 5.1.0
  • TinEye Reverse Image Search 1.1.1

Oddly, a similar thing has happened on my home Windows 7 computer - only on that computer, it's not just Chrome these show up on, but Firefox as well; and from something called "Text Enhance".

So I am having to go through each extension and plug-in to find the culprit - my guess, due to the only commonality, is it was blindly inserted into the browser through installation/updating of either Instapaper or Evernote - which is disappointing, since I use and love both. I'll have to read their update/changes list to see if it's mentioned. Though, it is also likely one of the Google extensions that is (unknowingly?) the culprit. Anything is possible. I'll let you know if I find the answer. So far, in my research, it has resulted from a large number of various and different reasons - most being an extension or program (and one that is usually trusted).

Answer 3

I have confirmed that the cause of these text enhance links on my Google Chrome instance was a Chrome Plugin called Premiumplay, (associated with http://www.allpremiumsoft.com/)