Friday, 22 March 2013

Hijacked PCs defrauding advertisers


Fake clicks generated by the Chameleon botnet are earning fraudsters $6million per month, a London-based investigator has claimed.  

 The newly discovered ‘Chameleon botnet’ has hijacked 120,000 American PCs and is generating billions of fake clicks on adverts, Spider.io claimed.
In some cases, Chameleon accounts for two-thirds of a website’s traffic, generating huge incomes for owners who get on average 69 cents each time an advert on their site is clicked on.
Spider.io has tracked Chameleon since December and said the hijacked PCs, all running Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7, generated up to 9bn ‘impressions’ every month across more than 200 sites. Sophisticated software impersonated cursor movements and mouse clicks so that fraud detection software was fooled.
Dr Douglas de Jager, Spider.io’s chief executive, said in his report that “It is difficult to imagine why one would run this type of botnet across a cluster of 202 sites other than to commit display advertising fraud.”
The investigation does not reveal which sites were part of the fraud, and Dr De Jager said it was by no means unique. 

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