Archive for August 22nd, 2007

Click Fraud A-Listers

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

In this post, I take a leaf from Hollywood’s book and name the people whom I think are A-Listers in the world of click fraud.

The Hollywood A list if the roster of the most bankable film stars, a 100 point check list was developed by journalist James Ulmer,

I am opening this post up to comments to expand this list and create a who’ s who in click fraud so please let me know who should be added.

In at number one

Shuman Ghosemajumder

The Googleite and member of the Click Quality Team. Whenever Google want to talk with authority about click fraud (I know I keep calling it CF when they call it invalid clicks )they seem to roll out Shuman.

And at number two only because it is the second place search engine

Reggie Davis

Reggie is Yahoo’s click fraud Czar, not as vocal in the blogsphere as Shuman, but Reggie has been tasked at an executive level to combat click fraud.

Please leave your comments so we can make up a top ten.

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Operation Bot Roast

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

No this is not the latest title of a XXX rated DVD, this is an official FBI operation to crack down on ‘bot related cyber crime.

Robot or bot nets are collections of hundreds or even tens of thousands of computers infected with a virus which allows the “bot herder” or perpetrator of the attack to run programs which attack other machines on the Internet. These programs typically attempt to do the following:

    • Steal the computer owner’s identity;
    • Launch massive spam campaigns;
    • Engage in click-fraud—schemes which artificially inflate the number of visitors to a website; and
    • Launch denial of service attacks that can cripple web servers and crash sites.

The owner of the infected machine is typically unaware that their machine is under the control of the “bot herder”. It is therefore critical that end users take PC security very seriously. Anti virus software should be updated and OS patches such as those automatically sent out by Microsoft should be applied.

In the wider world of click fraud, bot net attacks can be very difficult to counter against. How does a system identify a single bot net click, which then stays on a page as if reading details against a real person clicking through and reading the contents of an e-commerce site? Expand this to tens of thousands of IP addresses and we get the very real threat of click fraud.

Details of the operation are available on the official FBI website.

“Hey Scully want to check out my bot?”

“Put that away Mulder!”

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