Security News > 2020 > June > Crime agency turns to Google ads to deter teen DDoS hackers
Britain's National Crime Agency has hit on what looks like a simple way to stop impressionable teens from being sucked into cybercrime - advertise the terrible legal consequences using Google Ads.
It sounds too good to be true - can a simple ad deter teen would-be hackers that easily? In fact, the evidence of similar campaigns run by the NCA in the past is that it has some effect.
As Krebs himself notes, as useful a deterrent as the NCA's Google ads might have been, they're competing with - wait for it - rival campaigns run on the same Google AdWords system offering the very booter and stresser services the NCA is trying to stop.
Google says it takes down criminal ads when they are detected using a mix of automated systems and human intervention, which has worked well in the recent past to block the scammy tech support ads that once filled up search results.
An alternative view is that ad campaigns such as these are about something bigger than deterring the small teen user base for DDoS services.