Click Fraud

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But in order to know these hackers you need to understand their motivations, and in many cases those motivations may not be what you expect. That's according to Dan Kaminsky, the security expert who discovered a fundamental flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) protocol in 2008 and who discovered flaws in the widely used SSL protocol a year later. Kaminsky is a frequent speaker at Black Hat Briefings, and now works as Chief Scientist at White Ops, a security firm specializing in detecting bot and malware fraud.

To counter click fraud there are a number of firewall, blocking and monitoring tools and services available. For example, an AdSense Plugin for Google AdSense can help vendors who encounter malicious or unintended third party clicks on website advertisements. The plugin is designed to block visitors from seeing ads when they click multiple times on them.

We have a global team which is dedicated to staying on top of your concerns, monitoring traffic across Google's ad network, and preventing advertisers from paying for invalid traffic. While they provide protection without you needing to do anything, we also know you want to do whatever you can to ensure the best performance for your ads. We have created this website to aggregate various resources that help you learn about invalid clicks and maintain a successful AdWords or AdSense account.

Charges were dropped without explanation on November 22, 2006; both the US Attorney's office and Google declined to comment. Business Week suggests that Google was unwilling to cooperate with the prosecution, as it would be forced to disclose its click fraud detection techniques publicly.

Organized crime can handle this by having many computers with their own Internet connections in different geographic locations. Often, scripts fail to mimic true human behavior, so organized crime networks use Trojan code to turn the average person's machines into zombie computers and use sporadic redirects or DNS cache poisoning to turn the oblivious user's actions into actions generating revenue for the scammer. It can be difficult for advertisers, advertising networks, and authorities to pursue cases against networks of people spread around multiple countries.

Last October, Boris Elpiner noticed something odd about the Web traffic coming to his company from its PPC ads. As vice president of marketing for RingCentral, an online telecommunications firm in San Mateo, California, Elpiner is in charge of its affiliate-ad program, which hired Yahoo! to distribute RingCentral's ads onto Web sites with compatible content. Poring over his records, he discovered that a keyword term ("fax software download") that had previously generated almost no clicks was suddenly pulling them in. The total cost to RingCentral for the clicks – $2,500 over about four weeks – "was significant, but not immediately noticeable."

Definitely something all advertisers need to be aware of. If your search spend is significant its worth investing in detection software, although thats by no means completely reliable. The real problem is for small advertisers and local businesses who would never be able to identify or really quantify the amount they're spending for competitors to click on their ads. The reality is there's no way Google can detect click fraud at a local, manual level. This is scaring off a huge number of small advertisers so it surprises me google don't make their anti-click fraud measures more public.

In its amended counterclaims, SteelHouse alleges that, through "extensive" analysis of the web logs of the clients that overlap between the pair, it found that "3.6% of Criteo's 'users' generate 25% of its clicks."

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 m�lange 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.

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