A new botnet has taken over 120,000 computers and is using them to click on ads in the background in a hidden web browser — and with every click, big advertisers pay. Major companies including BMW, Virgin, and Pillsbury may be losing a combined $6.2 million each month for advertising on a network of websites that has been targeted by the newly discovered Chameleon botnet. How Chameleon's operators profit from defrauding these advertisers is murky, however.
While the bots only explicitly serve to waste advertisers' money, they also create higher view counts that make a given website appear more valuable. Chameleon visits a specific set of 202 websites, and paidContent reports that many of the those sites are owned by a single ad...
via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4123720/massive-botnet-defrauds-advertisers-millions-shady-origins http://www.theverge.com/