Last night the Google AdWords blog announced a paper they published named The Anatomy of Clickbot.A. The paper was rewritten by Neil Daswani, Michael Stoppelman, and the Google Click Quality and Security Teams. Here is the abstract:

This paper provides a detailed case study of the architecture of the Clickbot.A botnet that attempted a low-noise click fraud attack against syndicated search engines. The botnet of over 100,000 machines was controlled using a HTTP-based botmaster. Google identified all clicks on its ads exhibiting Clickbot.A-like patterns and marked them as invalid. We disclose the re- sults of our investigation of this botnet to educate the security research community and provide information regarding the novelties of the attack.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Legal: Clickfraud

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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