Archive for the ‘Features’ Category
Do Facebook Flyers Fix Fraudsters?
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
This series on social network sites and their pay per click programs, and the risk of click fraud when using them continues with an analysis of Facebook’s Flyer Pro program.
Facebook has expanded on it’s Flyer program which was a traditional cost per impression (CPM) program to produce the imaginatively titled Flyer Pro program, a pay per click model. Using this system, advertisers can create a flyer to send to the Facebook home page of a demographically selected group of users.
Flyers are the skyscraper type ads which are displayed on the left hand side of a Facebook home page just below the search and application list.
How it works:
- An advertiser must create a Facebook account with credit card attached to it.
- From the account page they create a flyer with the following set; theme, title, body of flyer and they can also upload an image to increase the impact of an ad if required.
- Demographics are set including location, sex, age, keywords, political views, relationship status, education level and workplace details.
- The next stage of the process is to set max cost per click and max daily budget, terms most PPC advertisers are familiar with.
The Facebook website has this to say about max CPC:
A higher max price per click increases the chance your ad will be shown. We discount clicks on your behalf, so you may pay less than your max price depending on the current demand for your ad’s audience. We will never bill you more in a day than your budget.
One of the most powerful search criteria is the keyword setting. Unlike a search engine PPC campaign, the keyword is a tag people are using on their accounts, rather than a supposed keyword people will type in. As demographics and keywords are set, the audience size is show to the advertiser. This leads to very controlled and targeted advertising.
At first glance the model appears to be resilient to click fraud, there is no way for a competitor to get at your ads from their home page as the Facebook server controls the push of your flyer and there is no syndication of ad revenue to create a publisher click fraud scenario as we see on Adsense, and any attempts at multiple clicks will be very easy to spot as they emanate from your home page.
There is however a chink in the armour of Facebook, example flyers can be viewed from the Flyer Board http://www.facebook.com/flyer_board.php, when I checked this out, it looked as if flyers available to me were being displayed. I have requested confirmation from Facebook (they have not replied at time of writing) to see if these Flyer Boards cost if a click is generated. A simple clickbot could be employed to repeatedly click on an Ad and deplete the advertisers budget if I was competing in the same space as them.
So in conclusion, where I thought StumbleUpon is click fraud proof, Facebook has a flaw (in my opinion) which needs to be plugged before advertisers can have complete faith in the process.
UPDATE
Facebook have replied to my query, and only the original flyer program is shown on the flyer board.
With a flyer pro campaign we do not display the flyers on the flyer
board of networks. Flyers will appear on the left hand side of users
profile pages. Let me know if you have any further questions.
So in conclusion, it looks like the new Facebook Flyer Pro program is inherently click fraud proof and is a good choice for PPC advertisers who want highly targeted exposure. It should be noted that the old Flyer program may be the subject to click fraud attacks via impression fraud.
Tags: social networks
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StumbleUpon, Is It Click Fraud Proof?
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
In my continuing series on social network sites and their click fraud benefits, I discuss StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon (SU) is marketed as channel surfing for the Internet, it’s users flick from site to site giving the content a thumbs up or down and then move on, or stay if they like what they see.
The Stumbler (as they are know) installs a button marked Stumble onto their browser, they click on the button and they are redirected to a random website. If they like it, they click on another thumbs up button, they dislike it, the dreaded thumbs down is given. Whilst browsing the net, Stumblers can also suggest new sites for fellow surfers to check out.
The social network aspect of this system, is the creation of virtual friends on the SU main site where they can share sites, and pages they have discovered. From the main site, a Stumbler will select their interest groups, this will decide which web pages are served up to that user. The top level interest groups are arts,commerce, computers, health, living and media.
Back to the main reason of this article, the pay per click advertising programme they have created and the investigation into their claim that it is click fraud proof.
Pay per click on the StumbleUpon system works in the following fashion:
- The user creates an account
- One or more campaigns are created.
- A campaign is associated with a website URL.
- The URL is assigned to one or more interest groups.
- A daily budget is set, and funds are credited to the StumbleUpon account via PayPal.
- The campaign goes through an approval process.
Once approved the campaign is activated on the StumbleUpon network and it is served up to Stumblers for their surfing pleasure.
The real difference in the SU model is that each display of the website comes at a fixed fee of 5 cents, and there is currently no way to increase that amount in order to improve the frequency or prominence of that display.
This is a push model rather than the pull model used by Google and Co. I say this because it is the SU servers which decide which web page to display to the channel surfing Stumbler. In between paid display there will be normal “organic” displays. The algorithm used to display web pages which are paid or organic is unknown to this correspondent. A request for details has been submitted to SU but not response has been received to date.
Website owners can limit where there ads are displayed via geographic, age and sex demographics.
With the above in mind I find it difficult to see how third parties outside of StumbleUpon itself could commit click fraud, there is no way for a competitor to select your ad click on it, there is no syndication service for people to benefit from, thus removing publisher click fraud and clickbots or click farms have no say in when you ad is displayed. So in answer to the article heading, Yes I think this method is click fraud proof.
The following statement is extracted from the StumbleUpon Advertisers FAQ
How does StumbleUpon prevent click-fraud?
StumbleUpon doesn’t syndicate paid listings to third parties - the primary source of click-fraud in pay-per-click networks. We also don’t have any mechanism by which someone can force your site to come up as a paid result, so a competitor can’t drain your account.
If you would like more details on StumbleUpon paid placement visit their website http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads
Further reading Stumble Upon User Ate My Hamster.
Tags: social networks
Posted in Features | 2 Comments »
Can Advertisers Turn to Social Network Sites to Prevent Click Fraud?
Monday, October 29th, 2007
The rise of the social network in recent years has been an Internet phenomenon, and a large number of web marketers are trying to tap into these fertile markets where a well presented idea can go “viral” very quickly.
Over a series of posts I will discuss the rise of PPC programmes within social networking sites, and ask the question, is this type of advertising a solution to click fraud?
Social networks can be defined as a software solution which facilitates interaction between groups of like minded people. The most widely used social networking sites at the time of writing are MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and StumbleUpon. Groups of individuals will connect with each other and share discussions, media such as photographs,audio and video.
The communities approach very quickly build demographic groups which marketers are very keen to tap into. Some are creating viral content which is spread by community members. An example of this are Facebook applications. A very successful one was a Zombie program which allows friends to bite each other which turns a person into a Zombie in true horror movie fashion. Behind this extremely successful marketing campaign were the producers of a new Zombie film, who were able to spread the message of the film’s release to a large number of engaged users.
Moving forward from this, the social network companies are looking to tap into their own users via pay per click functionality. I intend to discuss the offerings of both StumbleUpon and Facebook over two future articles. The thing which differentiates these two PPC models is that they appear to be inherently less susceptible than the models in use by the major search engines.
In the next article I will focus on the PPC model adopted by StumbleUpon.
Tags: social networks
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Competitor Click Fraud
Friday, October 26th, 2007
I have created a series of definition articles describing what competitor click fraud is,who and why they would do it and what to do in the event of an attack.
I have brought all of the article together in one post, with links to the individual articles shown below:
- Competitor Click Fraud - A Definition
- How to Spot Competitor Click Fraud
- How To Stop Competitor Click Fraud
Tags: Competitor Click Fraud
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Dubious Practices of Adwords For Domains
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
Google have come under a lot of criticism this week for some of the less than scrupulous activities they are engaging with in the Adwords for domains programme.
The adwords for domain programme lets very large players in on-line search such as AOL or ASK syndicate the adverts of Adwords on their own sites. In exchange for this, Google pays out a share of the Adwords revenue.
This is a worthwhile and valid way to extend the reach of Adwords ads, and the search network helps Google to reach over 80% of the internet audience, but there are a number of properties which are not returning high quality clicks, but Google are charging their customers a premium.
The problem stems from domain parking companies such as DomainSponsor. Domain parking is the practice of holding a domain open on the internet without having any valid content on it. This is usually due to pre-registered domains which have never been developed, with the original purchase reason being to resell the domain.
So DomainSponsor and a number of other domain parking companies have signed up for the Adwords for domain programme, and are displaying adwords for domain ads on the parked sites. These ads are in context with the domain name.
People come to these domains largely by accident and any clicks on these made for adsense sites are usually of very low quality, and are unlikely to generate a conversion for the advertisers.
Now we come to the root problem of these sites, Google charge an advertiser for any clicks as if they were premium clicks emanating from a genuine search engine. This is direct contradiction to the Google policy of reducing the cost per click of low quality sites displaying ads via the adsense programme which these clicks closely resemble.
This is NOT click fraud, rather it is low quality clicks being masked as premium search clicks which tarnishes the reputation further of an organisation which deliberately obscures it operating procedures.
Tags: click quality
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How To Stop Competitor Click Fraud
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
In the first two part of the series on competitor click fraud I created a definition of competitor click fraud, then went on to discuss how to spot competitor click fraud, now I will talk about how you can stop those pesky competitors clicks.
The most valuable piece of information you will have collected during your investigation into competitor fraud is the domain details of your competition. Using a service such as whois.org it is possible to do a reverse lookup of the domain name to get the IP address range of the company. Alternatively, the domain will be masked and you will already have a suspect IP address.
Equipped with the IP address head off to your PPC supplier and exclude the IP address from being able to access your ads. This stops your competitor dead in their tracks by not displaying your ad to any computer with the IP address (or range of addresses) you supply.
Using the belt and braces approach I then go on to ensure no competitors are able to display my ads on their domains by adding their name to my excluded list with regards to content network displays from Google.
So up to this point we have excluded machines from seeing our ads, the next point is to tell-tales. Make a report to Google about your findings, stating explicitly that you believe you have been the subject of a competitor fraud, refer to my article Getting a refund from your PPC supplier for details contacting the search engines.
The above points should be more than enough to stop competitor clicks, your only recourse if they keep attacking you is to contact your local legal team for a cease and desist letter. This will only work if your competitor is in the same jurisdiction as yourself. This of course may force the company to more underhand and alarming click fraud attacks through ClickBots or click farms.
I advise most people who are the subject of click fraud to look into one of the inexpensive click fraud monitoring solutions. They help to identify invalid clicks much more easily and provide a wealth of evidence to give to the search engines for your refund. Make it a matter of course to create a monthly report for fee refunds.
Tags: Competitor Click Fraud
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How to Identify Competitor Click Fraud
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
In the second article in our series on competitor click fraud, I go on to detail how to spot competitor click fraud.
In a previous article I documented the tell tale signs of click fraud, this post will expand upon those ideas to help identify specific competitor click fraud.
The first stage is to be aware of your competitors. There is a very simple way to tell who your potential click fraud competitors are:
Type your key words into your search engine of choice and your competitors will be revealed to you, under the sponsored link section. Take some time to note the domain names of your competitors including the companies who are not reaching the first page as they are more likely to engage in dubious practices to get their ads on the first page.
This must come with the caveat that all of your competitors are not advertising all of the time so they may slip through the net, the answer to this is to search for your competitors a number of times, and at different times during the day.
Equipped with this information it is now time to fire up your analytics program. They key piece of data you should be analysing is the domain metric. This will either be the IP address of the person visiting or in the case of a corporate system, a NAT address coming from the domain of the competitor. If you are presented with an IP address use the IP to Domain name lookup tools from www.whois.org to find out who the perp is.
In the next part of our competitor click fraud series, I will discuss what to do if you are the victim of this type of invalid click. Should you go in all guns blazing or are there more subtle tools in your arsenal?
Tags: Competitor Click Fraud
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Competitor Click Fraud - A Definition
Monday, October 22nd, 2007
A question I am often asked is “What is competitor click fraud?” In this post I aim to create a definitive answer to that question.
Firstly I would like to paint a scenario for our definition, your company is advertising on a pay per click provider, for clarity of our scenario, I will say it is Google. You are bidding on one of the extremely aggressive keywords such as “home mortgage” and your company is prepared to pay 25 USD per click for a lead into this very lucrative market, and your daily advertising budget is 2000 USD.
With the above scenario in place we can see how attractive competitor click fraud is, but what is it?
In brief another company bidding on the same keywords as you will click on your ads in an effort to deplete your daily budget. Your company will pay for the click, but the click will never create a return on investment.
Competitor companies will do this for one of two reasons:
1) To stop your ad running on Google and place theirs with less competition. They do this by clicking on your ad until your daily budget is reached and Google stops displaying your ads as instructed.
2) To reduce their cost per click i.e. if they want to pay 23 USD per click, your ability to pay 25 USD will keep them off the top spot and possibly the all important first page. Geting rid of the competition lets them control the max cost per click
I mention that is is attractive to commit click fraud, why do I say this? It is a simple question of economics, if it costs 25 USD to tempt a user onto the site, eighty clicks would deplete our fictional budget and create a charge with no return on investment against a competitor company. It’s a ruthless world out there.
The mechanics of competitor click fraud are exactly the same as another type of click fraud, it will be manually via a person sitting and clicking on your ads, the next level up will be from a click farm where groups of people will be paid to click on your links and lastly via a clickbot or automated software program which will create the invalid clicks.
So now you know what competitor click fraud is, in the next article in our series I will tell you how to spot if you are a victim of competitor click fraud.
Tags: Competitor Click Fraud
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Click Fraud - A Story of Intrigue
Friday, October 19th, 2007
The transcript of this click fraud investigation reads like the story from a spy novel, agents in Somalia were posing as legitimate users from Amsterdam attacking the secretive operation in England, or was is double agents based in Somalia attacking the political dissident. This was not the plot line from the latest Le Carre novel, rather it is the story of a click fraud attack I was subject to. In this post I will document the whole story from detection, to reporting and ending up at a follow up visit to the culprits website.
The events in this story are all true, and happened during September 2007, the name have NOT been changed to protect the guilty.
During September I was running an Adwords campaign to drive traffic to this blog, the campaign was bidding on click fraud related keywords and had a relatively low max cost per click of 0.25 (GBP). The campaign was running worldwide with no time zone limitation and it was also running on the content network. All of the points noted are against much of the anti-click fraud advice I give, probably because I was keen to capture a real click fraud attempt with my newly installed click fraud software.
Sure enough, not long after the campaign was launched, I began to receive repeated clicks from a number of IP addresses which were registered to an Amsterdam address. I am happy to say that my click fraud software works and I began receiving e-mail alerts.
Interested in who was attacking me, I went to whois.org and performed a lookup against an IP address. The offending address whois lookup is shown below:
OrgName: RIPE Network Coordination Centre
OrgID: RIPE
Address: P.O. Box 10096
City: Amsterdam
StateProv:
PostalCode: 1001EB
Country: NLReferralServer: whois://whois.ripe.net:43
NetRange: 193.0.0.0 - 193.255.255.255
CIDR: 193.0.0.0/8
NetName: RIPE-CBLK
NetHandle: NET-193-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType: Allocated to RIPE NCC
NameServer: NS-PRI.RIPE.NET
NameServer: NS3.NIC.FR
NameServer: SUNIC.SUNET.SE
NameServer: NS-EXT.ISC.ORG
NameServer: SEC1.APNIC.NET
NameServer: SEC3.APNIC.NET
NameServer: TINNIE.ARIN.NET
Comment: These addresses have been further assigned to users in
Comment: the RIPE NCC region. Contact information can be found in
Comment: the RIPE database at http://www.ripe.net/whois
RegDate: 1992-08-12
Updated: 2005-08-03
I THEN QUERIED THE RIPE DATABASE
inetnum: 193.219.242.0 - 193.219.242.255netname: GTC-NET-SO descr:Golis Telecommunication country:SO admin-c: YMA6-RIPEtech-c: YMA6-RIPEstatus: ASSIGNED PAremarks: --------------remarks: T-IP-20040728remarks: --------------mnt-by: TAIDE-NOCsource: RIPE # Filteredperson: Yahye Mohamud Ahmedaddress: Bosaso,Somalia phone: +252 5 722002phone: +252 5 822016fax-no: +252 5 822011e-mail: yahye@golis.nete-mail: meecad@hotmail.comnic-hdl: YMA6-RIPE source:RIPE # Filtered
Upon further investigation, I noticed in the refer information of all the attacks were coming from a single Adsense account and website. From this I made the deduction:
1) That someone trying to boost their Adsense earnings was clicking on their own links.
2) In a much more interesting turn of events, to add to the intrigue of this whole story I like to think that the website owner was being attacked as the site, which is based in Somalia, was showing political cartoons alongside Adsense and other banner ads. Some dark agents of the Somalian government were clicking on this dissidents links to cut of his or her income which was being used to fuel anti-government propaganda (always the conspiracy theorist I go for this possibility :-))
The Adsense account ID is ca-pub-0558200840132548 and the offending website is www.aminarts.com
I collected the appropriate information and lodged an invalid click investigation from the form at Google, in a previous post I have documented getting a refund from your PPC supplier, check that out for more details.
I provided the following to Google, please note the actual report was much longer, and has been abridged for clarity
TO: Google Adwords Support,
My name is Neil Matthews. My account ID is xxx-xxx-xxxx.
I would like to report the following suspicious activity that I
have detected during 09/2007.In particular I am seeing a lot of problems emanating from an Amsterdam IP address via www.aminarts.com
using Adsense ID ca-pub-0558200840132548===============================
IP ADDRESS: 193.219.242.40
===============================
Number Of Suspicious Clicks: 22
Time Of The First Click: September 18, 2007, 1:45 pm
Time Of The Last Click: September 22, 2007, 2:15 am
Referring URL:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=946656542941&lmt=1189488293&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=946656541359&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Fsep_7_07.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&color_t
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1190210567593&lmt=1187337021&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=468×60_as&output=html&correlator=1190210566484&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_12_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&co
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1190176577359&lmt=1186642883&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=468×60_as&output=html&correlator=1190176577328&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_6_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&col
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1171908513015&lmt=1186130281&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1171908512937&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_2_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&col
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1190224766859&lmt=1186133881&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1190224766812&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_2_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&col
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1190228742765&lmt=1186133878&prev_fmts=468×60_as&
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1190228742640&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_1_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&col
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1190234317156&lmt=1190174273&prev_fmts=468×60_as&
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1190234317140&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Fsep_15_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&co
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1190256870736&lmt=1190174273&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1190256870666&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Fsep_15_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&co
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1190262102421&lmt=1190013894&prev_fmts=468×60_as&f;
ormat=234×60_as&output=html&correlator=1190262102343&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Fgolis_new.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&colo
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1041461065515&lmt=1186130281&format=468×60_as&output=html&correlator=1041461065484&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_2_2007.htm&color_bg=CCFFFF&color_text=000000&color
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1041461286484&lmt=1187333424&format=468×60_as&output=html&correlator=1041461286437&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_15_2007.htm&color_bg=CCFFFF&color_text=000000&colo
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1041461425031&lmt=1187333424&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1041461424765&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_15_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&co
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1041461425031&lmt=1187333424&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1041461424765&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_15_2007.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&co
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1041461562718&lmt=1187890854&format=468×60_as&output=html&correlator=1041461562718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_19_07.htm&color_bg=CCFFFF&color_text=000000&color_
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1172774004749&lmt=1188167485&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;
format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1172774004398&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_17_07.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&colo
THE REPORT GOES ON BUT HAS BEEN CUT SHORT FOR CLARITYI then sat down to wait. The expected reply in three working days did not arrive, I was not until 4th October that the following reply was received from the Googleplex:
Hello Neil,
We received your report regarding suspicious clicks from IP address
193.219.242.40. Thank you for your patience while we researched this
issue.
It appears that the activity you noticed was a result of invalid clicks
your ads received on a site in our content network. Thank you for bringing
this issue to our attention.
You should receive a credit to your AdWords account within a few weeks for
any charges for clicks we believe were invalid. Please also know that this
site’s AdSense account has been disabled and the publisher will not be
allowed further participation in the Google Network.
We strive to upgrade our detection mechanisms to pro-actively combat
invalid click activity. Thank you for your assistance with our
investigation. We apologise for any inconvenience.
Sincerely,
Andrew
The Google Ad Traffic Quality Team
In previous reports to Google they are quick to say that their filters have captured the clicks and that I have not been charged for them, but in this reply there is no mention of capture, from this I assume the filters did not capture the problem. I was awarded a refund of 24.96 (GBP). This is not an earth shaking click fraud, but in context to my monthly adwords spend of approximately 200 (GBP) this is a substantial percentage.
During the writing of this article, I revisted www.aminarts.com and I was glad to see they were no longer running Adsense ads.
In conclusion to this post, I would like to add that it is highly unlikely that I would spot a click fraud attempt like this without the use of click fraud monitoring software. The monthly charge of the click fraud monitoring software would easily be covered by refunds like mine.
Tags: Click Fraud
Posted in Features | 3 Comments »
RxBot Has Click Fraud Capability
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
I came across a interesting post about click bots, in particular a new bot to me RXBOT which has a visit command, Read the full post on Bardissi Enterprises, but the relevant section for anyone interested in click fraud is shown below
Nowadays, the lure of illegal easy money motivates most bot herders. Our video shows how crooks can force their bots to click on revenue-generating Google ad words. As another example, Rxbot has a simple-yet-effective .visit command. If you send your bots this command, followed by a URL, they silently visit that URL. Here, silently is a technical term meaning the bot victim will not see her computer visit the URL. The visit happens in the background, without any web browser involvement. So, imagine you have 100,000 bots. With one command you could easily force all those bots to visit an online poll, vote, or game. If you wanted ToneDeaf UglyDork to win American Idol, you could command all your bots to visit the American Idol voting page and submit a vote. Since every vote would come from a different IP address, the results would look legitimate. And if the flaws in American e-voting aren?t fixed before 2008, bots just might elect ToneDeaf UglyDork as President, too.
Tags: click bots
Posted in Features | No Comments »