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Bahama Botnet Stealing Traffic From Google

Posted by timothy on from the now-that's-offsides dept.

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.

4 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Yay Click Fraud by rwv · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because having retailers pay for ads that will never generate sales is the only way to make them realize that it's not worth it to advertise in the first place.

    As an aside, I'm looking forward to the new US blog rules that go into effect in a month that state bloggers need to say if they are getting paid to promote a product.

    1. Re:Yay Click Fraud by rwv · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Rather, ads are used to build your reputation and increase familiarity.

      I would agree to this, except for the fact that there are so many advertisers who use obnoxious flash ads that distract and dance on the screen. These monstrosities don't make any attempt to build reputation.

      Also, the other day I saw an "Amazon" ad for a cordless drill (a product that I'm in the market for). They were advertising a sale for a product that I actually wanted and it came up either by luck or because they used cookies to figure me out. Either way... no click because they used an hidden/embedded flash link and so there is zero trust from me that the ad was actually going to take me to Amazon.

      I think the whole industry is fucked, and while I admit it's wishful thinking to hope that advertising goes away... I know that they'll be around for a long, long time.

    2. Re:Yay Click Fraud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Speaking as someone who's currently consulting for a company building analytics tools for several of the biggest ad servers, I am (very) sorry to say that these ads *do* generate sales, a depressingly large amount in fact.

  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion