

Online advertisers: unwittingly funding cybercriminals since 2011 - dvd03
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/24/online-advertisers-funding-cybercriminals

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ub
I believe that crime will increasingly move online,including wars. Cyberwars
and cyber-fraud are the growing menaces of today's world. And, the NSA
revelations about deliberately injecting weaknesses into encryption algorithms
have only made it worse. The challenge here is that these crimes are faceless
and borderless. So each of us is left to our own to protect the devices we use
and thus, ourselves from an unknown enemy/criminal.

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spindritf
> The average number of infected PCs across the globe stands at 31.13
> percent.[1]

Even if exaggerated a bit for effect, those are some scary stats.

[1] [http://press.pandasecurity.com/news/pandalabs-q1-report-
troj...](http://press.pandasecurity.com/news/pandalabs-q1-report-trojans-
account-for-80-of-malware-infections-set-new-record/)

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Pxtl
Indeed. I wonder what the profile is of these users - are they all running XP
or has this malware extended into Vista/7? Are we talking about grandmas with
"add color to your email" bugs? College students? Normal users?

I wonder if it will get to the point that Google starts bundling system-
cleanup anti-spyware with the Chrome browser and pushing that same software on
the Google home-page. If the problem truly sits at 30% of all users and we're
talking about 10X the normal fraudulent click-throughs vs legit click-throughs
for bots, then around 90% of Google's ad-related income is from fraudulent
clicks.

A lawsuit for anything approaching that full amount would _end_ Google. This
is their primary revenue stream.

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Nanzikambe
It's definitely extended way into Vista/7/8\. I'm always surprised how easily
even relatively savvy users are tricked into clicking something malicious.

The volume of traffic originating from compromised machines plinging away at
firewalls is incredible

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janesvilleseo
As a user of AdWords, I have a couple campaigns that Google itself indicates
have a click fraud rate of 10-12%. This is the percentage that Google
acknowledges and knows about. I wonder how much it doesn't know about or worse
knows but doesn't acknowledge.

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Nanzikambe
My, haven't things come a long way since the days a botnet implied eggdrop &
irc?

