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back to article Chameleon botnet grabbed $6m A MONTH from online ad-slingers

A web analytics firm has sniffed out a botnet that was raking in $6m a month from online advertisers. The so-called Chameleon botnet mimicked human visitors on select websites, causing billions of display ad impressions to be served to compromised machines. As many as 120,000 infected drones have been discovered so far. Almost …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hey, leave the bots alone!

    Somebody has to click on those adverts and make advertisers happy.

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    1. h3
      Reply Icon

      Re: Hey, leave the bots alone!

      Yep anything that makes ad network lose money is 100% aok with me.

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      1. horse of a different color
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        Mushroom

        Re: Hey, leave the bots alone!

        I assume you prefer pay walls to adverts? And big media conglomerates to small independent publishers? It's advertising that's paying for them sites, not unicorns and pixie dust.

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  2. dssf

    Deviant...

    Lol: "to identify deviant consumption of display advertising media."

    Deviant as skewed, but not as "having bothered to entertain the advert"....

    As Spock would say, "Sophisticated in their methods..."

    Now, i am sure that the botnet writers will just make sure their bots crash more gracefully and more virtually, not taking down whole machines and causing them to re-request an IP, which by time lag, would be easy to pick if an investigative team had permission to dig into target domains and subnetss....

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  3. VeganVegan
    Devil

    I smell collusion

    And the bot master make money, how?

    I presume that advertisers pay the web sites where the ads are displayed, how does the money get to the bot masters? Kickback? Fake web sites just for harvesting ad revenue?

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    1. horse of a different color
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      Mushroom

      Re: I smell collusion

      It dependes - the publisher might be buying what they think is legitimate traffic for their site, but is in fact fraudulent. (If you're wondering how you can 'buy' traffic for your site, that's what companies like Outbrain are doing when they put lists of links on publisher pages). That's the only case in which I think the publisher might be considered an innocent victim.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I smell collusion

        Yes, but how do the botnet creators make money off this?

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        1. Displacement Activity
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          Re: I smell collusion

          They also own the sites which host the adverts, or have an agreement with the owners. In other words, they publish the ads, and their botnet then clicks the ads. The advertiser pays the network (Google, for example) something in the region of 10c - 50c for the botnet's click, and Google pays the site owner some percentage of this. Great work if you can get it.

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          1. Shagbag
            Reply Icon
            Pint

            Re: I smell collusion

            @Displacement Activity

            Thanks for clarifying that. Until I read your post I was completely confused.

            Cheers.

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        2. horse of a different color
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          Mushroom

          Re: I smell collusion

          Publishers _buy_ traffic from them.

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  4. foo_bar_baz
    Coat

    Can you please post the traffic profile?

    I'd like to be blacklisted by advertisers too.

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    1. Michael Habel
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      Re: Can you please post the traffic profile?

      ^I SECOND THIS!!!

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is this any different from penny clicks from the early 2000's?

    I used to have a small PC farm running a click marco.

    Although I only every made $200 or so

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