Ad fraud: Video shows fake clicks and impressions generated by botnet

Advertising impression and click fraud is a major problem faced by all ad networks large and small, with a small minority of fraudulent publishers inflating their ad views with a botnet.

Hackers infect a series of home and office computers by offering infected files from file sharing sites or targeting security vulnerabilities in older browsers. Once the computers have been infected, the hackers group the computers together into a network or botnet, which they then use for a variety of illegal activities.

Botnets are commonly used for bringing down websites with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, sending spam, finding new machines to infect, and in this case generating fraudulent clicks and impressions.

In this video, the team from Forensiq isolated a particularly malicious bot and infected a virtual computer to become part of the botnet to show how billions of fraudulent impressions are generated per day by such activity.

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