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Click Forensics Detects Bahama Botnet
Mike Sachoff
Staff Writer
2009-09-18
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Click Forensics has announced it has identified an unusually large increase in click fraud traffic coming from a new botnet that is eluding the filters of even the most advanced search engines, publishers and ad networks.
 | | Click Forensics Detects Bahama Botnet |  |
Codenamed the "Bahama Botnet" by Click Forensics, the malware distributed botnet is using coordinated methods to mask itself as a legitimate high-quality source of search advertising traffic.
"During the past four years we've monitored billions of clicks for top search engines, ad networks, publishers and advertisers. This scheme is one of the most sophisticated we've seen," said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics.
"The botnet is effectively disguising the fraud it produces as 'good traffic' by altering the interval and breadth of the attacks across legions of infected machines."
The Bahama botnet commits click fraud in several different ways. It can generate paid clicks by using normal user behavior to turn an organic search into a paid click. It can also leverage the network of bot -infected machines to programmatically auto-generate paid clicks without any human interaction.
Click Forensics began tracking the botnet after detecting a sudden and ongoing increase in strange traffic patterns in live click stream data from multiple sources, including ad networks, search engines as well as publisher and advertiser websites. The botnet is codenamed "Bahama" because when it was first detected it redirected traffic through 200,000 parked domains located in the Bahamas.
The botnet has now been reprogrammed to redirect traffic through other intermediate sites hosted in Amsterdam, Netherlands; the United Kingdom; and San Jose, California.
About the Author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.
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