Botnet steals 'millions of dollars from advertisers'

[Jazzy]

A network of thousands of computers stealing millions of dollars from advertisers by generating fake advert viewings has been discovered.



British web analytics firm Spider.io claims the Chameleon botnet is made up of 120,000 home PCs and costs advertisers $6m (£3.9m) per month.



Spider.io said that Chameleon simulated clicks on adverts on over 200 sites.



The firm said the botnet was responsible for up to nine billion false ad views every month.



Websites that show display ad receive money when an ad is viewed, in what is called cost-per-impression advertising. It works by money being paid when an ad impression is viewed, and advertisers selling a product or a service pay the website owner a fixed amount each time their ad is viewed.



The ads are typically placed by advertising networks that act as middlemen - the network places the ad on the publisher's site and the advertiser pays the network and the publisher.



Mimicking humans

Graham Cluley, a computer security expert from net security company Sophos, told the BBC that there were ways for computer owners to protect their machines from this type of fraud - for instance, by using up-to-date anti-virus software.



The good news is that Chameleon is said to be quite unstable, and causes regular crashes and computer slowdown - something which might alert users to there being a problem with their PC.



He added that since Chameleon mimics human clicks, it is tricky for advertisers to easily spot the botnet.



It makes the click look more human by randomly moving the cursor and the place where the mouse clicks, and pretending to be Internet Explorer 9.0 running on Windows 7.



Advertising networks - not the advertisers themselves - need to work harder at identifying the difference between a genuine user clicking on an ad, and a compromise computer that has been turned into a click-fraud bot.

Source



Good luck with this one. These bots are getting smarter than humans.

 

[DrLeftover]

maybe pay per click advertising will go away because of this





Excuse me, I need to go light a couple of candles to that end..... not that I'm Catholic mind you, but it couldn't hurt.

 

[Evil Eye]

These bots are getting smarter than humans.

I'll believe that when I see a botnet creating its own botnet in order to reduce its workload

maybe pay per click advertising will go away because of this

Nah.