Fergie's Tech Blog

Botnets: Click Fraud's Next Frontier

Ben Elgin writes on BusinessWeek Online:

If you place an advertisement on Google or Yahoo!, and you're paying the search giants each time somebody clicks, it would be nice to know that the clicker is a human being who might actually purchase your product. Unfortunately, there are no such assurances.

The search engines routinely maximize their profits by recycling ads to millions of other Web sites, whose owners get a percentage from each click. And some of those secondary sites are run by scam artists who enlist people to click repeatedly on the ads. So you end up paying Google or Yahoo for those clicks, the fraudsters get a cut, and there's no positive impact on the sales of your product.

The search engines are trying to crack down on this phenomenon, known as click fraud. But the basic scam is already migrating to a higher technological plane. Search engines, marketers, and law-enforcement agencies are increasingly worried about networks of automated miscreants called "botnets." These are groups of computers that have been infected by malicious software that allows the fraudsters to seize control.

posted by Fergie @ 9/22/2006 09:51:00 AM