Much ado over click-fraud statistics
38063
(InfoWorld) - The battle between advertisers and online search networks over the pervasiveness of click-fraud continues to grow more heated with researchers claiming rapid growth of automated ad impressions and outside observers noting an overall lack of transparency in the space. According to a research report issued on July 19 by Click Forensics -- which markets services used by advertisers to analyze online advertisement traffic -- the average click-fraud rate for Web ads was 15.8 percent across the industry during the second quarter of 2007. The result indicates a 14.1 percent increase in click fraud when compared to the same period last year and a 14.8 percent gain over the first quarter of this year, based on the company's numbers. Further, Click Forensics contends that the fraud rate within pay-per-click networks run by industry leaders, including Google and Yahoo, accounted for 25.6 percent of all traffic during the second quarter, representing a 21.9 percent gain over the same timeframe in 2006 and a 19.2 percent leap in fraudulent hits compared to Q1 2007. Contributing heavily to the significant gains in contested impressions, Click Forensics maintains, was the increased use of hijacked botnet PCs to manipulate online traffic. While not offering concrete statistics on the trend, Click Forensics' research showed that such activity roughly doubled over the second quarter. Market watchers have been trumpeting massive growth of the online ad sector in 2007, and rightfully so, said Tom Cuthbert, chief executive of Click Forensics. However, if the online space is going maintain credibility with advertisers going forward, Cuthbert said, those who control the largest networks must begin working harder to track and eliminate inflated results. New York-based market research firm eMarketer has predicted that the North American online advertising segment alone will grow by more than $3 billion in 2007 to reach $19.5 billion by the end of this year. "The problem only appears to be getting worse within the content networks run by companies like Google and Yahoo, it's very concerning to advertisers, and the botnet issue appears to be fueling this growth," Cuthbert said. "A big part of the problem is that the content networks themselves aren't doing enough to look for traffic coming from automated sites and parked domains that only exist to create fraudulent clicks," he said. "We see a lot of this low-quality traffic occurring inside those networks." Click Forensics gathers its research data from Click Fraud Network, an effort it sponsors that aggregates information provided by the company's advertising customers about the advertising traffic that they receive. Yahoo representatives did not discredit the Click Forensics report but defended that the company is weeding out fraudulent ad hits and working to ensure that its customers only pay for legitimate traffic. "We've dedicated significant resources to delivering high-quality traffic to our advertisers and have identified and not billed for 12 to 15 percent of the clicks on our network [as a result of click-fraud]," said Reggie Davis, vice president of marketplace quality at Yahoo. The company is also launching new programs to help offer its advertisers a better idea of what they're paying for, Davis said. "Yahoo is also actively pursuing numerous new quality initiatives that provide advertisers with more control over and visibility into the quality of their traffic," he said. "We've recently launched new features and functionality for advertisers like quality-based pricing and enhanced geo-targeting tools, and we plan to introduce additional controls like domain blocking in the coming months." Google representatives contend, however, that Click Forensics is manipulating its numbers to make the rate of click fraud appear much higher than it actually is. A good deal of the traffic being counted by Click Forensics as click fraud is already identified as such by Google's own filters, the company said in a statement, which means its advertisers never get charged for those hits. "This estimate counts clicks Google does not charge to advertisers as fraudulent, so it is not actually a click-fraud estimate," Google said in the statement. "It is also worth noting that in all of 2007, only two advertisers have contacted us regarding click fraud data from Click Forensics, and in both cases, we found that the suspicious activity was not charged-for in the first place." Media representatives at Google labeled the Click Forensics report as an intentional effort to generate fear and drive interest in its own ad performance tracking services. The company has a firm grasp on click fraud and is devoting more resources than ever to combating the problem, the Google representative said. One of the biggest questions facing Click Forensics in defending its research is just where its numbers come from and how it quantifies the activity of botnets, which are often comprised of larger numbers of machines that spread traffic out as to evade discovery by behavior-monitoring filters. Cuthbert said that Click Fraud Network has attracted a large enough group of advertisers to garner accurate averages in traffic activity and countered that the firm has access to such data as the behaviors exhibited by bots once they arrive on its customers' sites that Google will never be privy to. "We use people from Symantec and Yahoo and eBay to help us determine these findings and approach the issue in a very scientific way that utilizes heuristics for identifying traffic for botnets and pay-for-click sites," Cuthbert said. "Our customers are drawing data from across multiple networks, which allows us to compare results; we get that behavior information about what a visitor does after they get to the site which tells us a lot about who they might be." For instance, when Click Forensics notices hits coming from a particular source on a regular pattern -- such as a new click every 2.5 seconds -- it's easy to tell what traffic might be generated by bots, he said. Cuthbert also noted that his company's methodology was examined by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, a professor at New York University who examined Google's click fraud practices and wrote a report used as part of the $90 million click-fraud settlement the search company reached with advertisers in March 2006. Other click-fraud experts, such as Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who has done extensive research in the area for a number of years, agreed that the problem continues to grow and that it's hard to believe which camp has more accurate numbers. However, the researcher's own recent experiments don't always gel with Click Forensics' observations. Edelman said that a system he has employed to monitor click-fraud activity on advertising networks by attempting to carry out the behavior has been able to scam just about every popular system, including that controlled by Yahoo's Omniture group. However, the "robot PC" he created to carry out the click fraud wasn't able to create false impressions on Google's AdWords, which impressed the Web economics expert. "The core problem is that it is still hard to determine whether the supposed clicks occurred, the search engines will always dispute published figures, and advertisers will be left uncertain who to believe," Edelman said. "In my own work using the robot, I've observed click fraud through almost every network, but not AdWords, not that it means it doesn't happen." One of the problems in figuring out to what extent click fraud is influencing ad traffic is that neither the search networks nor their advertisers are particularly open with the data they retain about user behavior, he said. People submit complaints to the search companies on an individual basis, but little comes of the reports other than automated responses, according to Edelman. One approach that could help address the issue would be if companies like Google and Yahoo created message boards where advertisers could compare notes and draw conclusions about their shared experiences, the researcher contends. Just as Apple has allowed its customers to vent about product problems in its public forums, the search networks could prove their diligence in fighting click fraud if they allowed customers to share information in public, the expert suggested. "A different way to run the traffic auditing and review process would be to add this transparency, to allow crowds of advertisers to expose their problems and share complaints, that would allow much less leeway for the search providers to bury their results," said Edelman. "It's clear why they might not want to do that, but they could do it if they were really confident that there's no problem to be exposed." Faced with the proposition, Google representatives said that the company would consider such an idea, but indicated that for now, it harbors no plans to introduce such a program. "Without that type of transparency, the extent of the click-fraud problem will remain tough to nail down," Edelman said.
720664
Some spammers are getting their messages through using techniques designed to spot and stop them. A survey shows that spammers are the biggest users of a technique designed to find out if e-mail comes from the net address it says it does.
187938
Beware of any e-mail claiming to come from "frauddep@ftc.gov"--it carries a nasty payload.
418640
The holiday season typically brings a surge in the number of fraudulent online orders, and smaller online retailers are being hit especially hard this year.
687414
Phishing is one of the fastest-growing forms of personal fraud in the world. While consumers are the most obvious victims, the damage spreads far wider--hurting companies&#39; finances and reputations and potentially
114781
A computer security researcher figures out exactly how a high-tech scammer
373551
Vaccines for sale online can be dangerous, and sellers could be perpetrating credit card fraud.
19520
By Greg Miller, Columbia Daily Tribune, Mo.  Sep. 23--Sabrina McDonnell knew that online crime was bad before Internet scoundrels flooded inboxes with phony e-mails trolling for First National Bank & Trust Co. account information.
535725
And Computer Associates too Tens of thousands of websites belonging to Fortune 500 corporations, state government agencies and schools have been infected with malicious code that attempts to engage in click fraud and steal online game credentials from people who visit the destinations, security researches say.â¦
757211
(InfoWorld) - Cybercriminals created a record number of phishing Web sites in July and also hijacked a record number of brands to help them do their work, a consortium that monitors online fraud said Monday. The number of phishing sites -- or fraudulent Web sites try to fool people into handing over sensitive personal information -- rose to 14,191 in July, an 18 percent increase over May, the previous all-time high, said the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). The fraudulent sites mimicked a record 154 brands, up 20 percent over June and 12 percent over the previous high, also recorded in May, APWG said. The latest figures show that online criminals are diversifying to target smaller financial institutions, Internet service providers and even government agencies, the group said. However, theÂ financial services industry is still targetedÂ the most, with more than nine out of 10 phishing sites aimed at that sector. The technical sophistication of phishing attacks is also increasing. APWG said that 1,850 phishing sites attempted to download a Trojan horse, a program that conceals itself in another, harmless-looking file but can be used to harvest personal information or download other malicious programs to an infected computer. APWG also said that one security vendor, Websense, detected special toolkits for sale on Russian Web sites to construct this kind of attack when a user visits a Web page. They can be fairly cheap, too: prices range from $20 to $300, APWG said. Also on the rise are "traffic redirector" Trojans, which force users to certain Web sites without their consent, APWG said. Overall, the United States hosts nearly 30 percent of all phishing sites, followed by South Korea at 13 percent and China at 12 percent, APWG figures shoed.
732842
Click Fraud and How to Stop It  Pay per click (PPC) advertising continues to gain popularity in the online  marketing world as an effective and inexpensive way to drive targeted visitors to web sites. Research firm eMarketer reported that between 2002 and 2003 the paid search listing market grew 175 ...
724391
Security experts warn of banner ads with a bad attitude--and a link to malicious code. Also: Phishers, be gone.
482174
The amount of click fraud detected by Google remains in single-digit percentages of total clicks, and the amount that slips through to advertisers is just 0.02 percent, according to Google.
162029
Rise in online identity fraud has companies on the hook: Educate customers or lose them.
740257
Stop reading all that 'clickwrap' fine print! A browser bot will accept or reject agreements on your terms. By Mark D. Rasch from Wired magazine.
203087
I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
420901
Most users think their computer is safe from adware and spyware--but they're wrong.