A Tale of Internet Shenanigans

by Gene Heratori
This had been a notable week in terms of the deluge of news articles regarding Internet fraud. Perhaps the summer heat and the forecast of temperatures rising into the 100s have an overall noxious effect on people’s behavior, compelling them to acquire the demeanor of cyber-villains in the same way that a full moon has been known to induce aggressiveness. Whatever the case may be, here is a recap that pushes the limits of the imagination:

I. The Trojan Horse and The MySpace.com Space Out

Remarkably, an online advertiser managed to insert the coding of a Trojan horse program into a banner advertisement running on the MySpace.com network. Visitors using older versions of Internet Explorer may have been infected. In effect, the way older versions of this browser process Windows Metafile images would have left them vulnerable to both hackers and adware programs alike. All of the estimates I’ve read indicated that the number may have been over one million MySpace.com users.

The Trojan horse coding itself does not distribute the unwanted pop up ads that plague infected computers. Rather, a Trojan horse covertly installs itself onto the user’s computers opening a line of communication with an outside server that downloads adware programs and other malware onto the users’ hard drives. I wonder why online advertisers are willing to subject themselves to lawsuits and criminal prosecution by choosing a ride on the Trojan horse??

What you can do to avoid this from happening to you: A tech-savvy friend once told me to download Mozilla Firefox as a way to avoid having my computer infected by simply visiting a page with a Trojan type program on it. Internet Explorer has also developed a patch that resolves this vulnerability to Windows Metafile images for aficionados who are loyal to this browser. If you’re a content publisher looking to earn revenue by displaying banner ads on your site, you should set in place a system of monitoring banner ads that you receive from your individual advertisers. Content publishers using third party advertising networks to distribute banner websites, should make sure your networks have taken appropriate measures to screen the banners before distribution.


II. Click Fraud Practitioners Beware!

Google is becoming even more proactive. Guys: do you remember your high school quarterback who was good looking, got into an Ivy League on a full scholarship, and yet still managed to be humble about it? Didn’t it annoy you! That must be how Google makes the competition feel. Last week, an Information Systems Professor at NYU by the name of Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin indicated that Google is and has been taking appropriate measures to handle the problem of click fraud for the benefit of their advertisers. According to Tuzhilin, Google’s team of Click Quality inspectors systematically covers all four corners of “pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection, and manual offline detection” while screening for invalid clicks.

Furthermore, a New York Times article indicates that Google plans on telling advertisers how many clicks are fraudulent. This transparency would be most reassuring, but for me this comes as no surprise. I remember receiving notice from Google that I had received a reimbursement in my Adwords account without me even having to ask for it. In my opinion, Google has already been on the ball in detecting click fraud for quite some time. Communicating this news to the public is done in order to reassure the nervous nellies of our space.

What you can do to avoid this from happening to you: If you’re a paid search advertiser, certain tracking and analytics software packages offer fraud detection tools. Keyword MAX for example offers a device called Click Auditor that appears on your screen as a gauge that looks like a speedometer, only instead of indicating speed, it detects the degree of fraud in your various paid search accounts. Paid search providers can detect an invalid click if it comes through a proxy server, through which a robot can send a request from more than one IP address.

Click fraud unfortunately happens, but with the proper tools, training, experience, and gut feeling, you can reduce the threat that it poses to you.

Look for more installments for this series in the next issue. Stay tuned!
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