Online advertisers: unwittingly funding cybercriminals since 2011 | Hacker News Reader

Online advertisers: unwittingly funding cybercriminals since 2011

wired.co.uk

38 pointsdvd038 comments

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.

> 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...

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.

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

More than 50% of PCs in China are infected? That seems unbelievably high.

Have you read about Chinese companies stealing IP? Standard practice is to assume your device is infected if you take it to China.

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21572250-old-fashioned-t...

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.

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

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