Google Publishes Papers On Clickbots

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.