The bane of online advertisers is click fraud, in which people or computers click on ads solely to generate a payment.

And just as spammers have adapted to evade detection, the people who commit click fraud are adopting increasingly sophisticated techniques, according to Click Forensics, a firm that analyzes traffic on behalf of advertisers and ad networks.

read more

Popularity: 14% [?]

Google’s AdSense earnings are threatened by a trojan that replaces the search giant’s paid-for adverts with its own, in order to hijack advertising revenue.

Launched in 2005, Google AdSense allows third-party Web sites or publishers to generate revenue from Google’s text advertisers.

AdSense acts as a middleman between an advertiser and a publisher. By crawling the content of publishers’ Web pages, AdSense determines the relevance of a text ad to page content and then places the ad within the page if there is a match.

Trojan.Qhost.WU, discovered by security firm BitDefender, has been designed to replace ads served by Google on third-party Web sites that use Google’s AdSense network. The ads are replaced with alternative ads called from hosts outside the AdSense network.

read more | source: ZDNet Asia

Popularity: 10% [?]