This month’s Wired Magazine has an excellent article on click-fraud — the practice of generating bogus clicks on Internet ads to either rack up affiliate fees or to rock up spurious charges against a competitor’s account — that explores the major sources of threats from click-fraud, the countermeasures arms-race against click-fraud, and the varying motives of fraud-fighters.
Other enterprising scammers manipulate the affiliate system by creating phony blogs – spam blogs, or splogs – that automatically generate content by continually copying bits from other Web sites, mixing in popular keywords, then signing up the resulting mélange as a Google or Yahoo! affiliate. By using software to link themselves repeatedly to well-known real blogs, splogs trick search engines into listing them high on their results list, thus generating traffic, which in turn generates ad clicks. When unsuspecting Internet searchers visit splogs, they end up clicking the ad links in a frustrated attempt to find some coherent text. Thousands of splogs exist, snarling the blogosphere – and the search engines that index it – in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automatic-blog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in PPC income, all without any human effort.
Probably the most worrisome emerging threat is zombie networks – hordes of linked machines controlled by rogue software. Without their owners’ knowledge, these boxes continuously send spam, transmit worms and viruses, participate in denial-of-service attacks, and execute a host of other antisocial tasks. These zombie networks can be enormous. In October, Dutch police charged three young men with controlling an incredible 1.5 million computers. In recent months, the owners of zombie networks have begun turning to click fraud – with “very effective” results, according to Tierney, the former click frauder. The robot machines create clicks from all around the world at apparently random intervals, making them difficult to identify.