Bahama Botnet Stealing Traffic From Google

itwbennett writes "'As part of its design, the Bahama botnet not only turns ordinary, legitimate PCs into click-fraud perpetrators that dilute the effectiveness of ad campaigns. It also modifies the way these PCs locate certain Web sites through DNS poisoning,' explains Juan Carlos Perez in an ITworld article. 'In the case of Google.com, compromised machines take their users to a fake page hosted in Canada that looks just like the real Google page and even returns results for queries entered into its search box. It's not clear where the Canadian server gets these results. What is evident is that the results aren't 'organic' direct links to their destinations, but are instead masked cost-per-click (CPC) ads that get routed through other ad networks or parked domains, some of which are in on the scam and some of which aren't.' 'Regardless, CPC fees are generated, advertisers pay, and click fraud has occurred,' Click Forensics reported on Thursday in a blog posting." Related: Techcrunch reports on a massive Chinese click-fraud ring controlling 200,000 IP addresses.

Comments

Re:Yay Click Fraud

[iYk6]

That's one potential outcome. I think it is more likely that advertising will just be worth less, and so ad based web sites will make less money per advertisement, and will need to show more advertisements to stay in business.

Fraud has been going on for a long time. This isn't new, and isn't going to change anything.

Re:Are clicks still being sold?

[cbiltcliffe]

So then people like me, who deny all cookies from advertising networks, are then committing click-fraud by not allowing the ad to be traced?

It doesn't matter how you do it; if it's on the Internet, there will be an edge case of some type that doesn't fit, and breaks your model. Whether it's criminal click-fraudsters, paranoid anti-cookie loons, or some guy who's surfing on their friend's computer. They click an ad, their friend makes a purchase a week later, and the advertiser gets paid for......what, exactly?