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New Click Fraud Click Laundering Discovered by Microsoft

Bryan Hoss — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:57:47 +0000

There is a new form of click fraud that has been discovered my Microsoft. This week Microsoft has filed two lawsuits against online advertising companies that have partaken in click laundering. Microsoft discovered the fraud do to unusual high volume of clicks coming from two different websites. If the fraud companies hadn’t been so obvious and greedy, Microsoft stated that they could have defrauded online merchants for hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.

click fraud is one of the biggest reasons why search engine optimization (SEO) typically returns a higher return on investment (ROI) then pay per click (PPC) advertising. With PPC a websites pays for every clicks it receives meaning if clicks are coming fraudulently the websites pays for those too. with organic SERP rankings the cost is in achieving top 10 or front page of Google rankings for the keywords and then the traffic is free so there is no cost to many how many times a person may visit your site.

click laundering discovered my Microsoft gets its name from the illegal action of laundering money. As with money laundering, click laundering makes fraud clicks look legitimate as to by pass fraud protection systems. Click laundering uses various means to make people click ads without even knowing they clicked an add to create revenue, plus they can alter the information that is sent to ad platforms so it looks like legitimate people clicked the ad though in reality they did not.

The lawsuits filed my Microsoft are a continuing efforts to protect online advertising by their Digital Crimes Unit. Microsoft was successful in earlier lawsuits that brought down click fraud using the game Warcraft.

Spam in Twitter Trending Topics

Authority SEO — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:24:31 +0000

On the right hand navigation of your Twitter profile is trending topics. A nice snapshot of the most tweeted topics on Twitter for the day. The idea is sound as I like to see what people are saying about current news and events though now I stay away because the trending topics is full of spam.

I believe spam is the #1 threat to Twitter. Twitter needs to get a handle on the automatic spam that is every where in Twitter. You now have to very careful when clicking on a link in trending topics as it could send you to a site ready to dump spyware and viruses onto your computer. I personally use Trend Micro for security which prevents me from opening dangerous web pages. I like reading information on Twitter and don’t really want to have to rely on Trend Micro to keep me out of harms way. As of right now I don’t even click into ‘trending topics’ in Twitter anymore.

I hope Twitter gets a handle on the spam running wild through their service so we can enjoy the many uses of Twitter.

Worm in Fake Twitter Invite Creates Havoc – Warning

Authority SEO — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:47:32 +0000

A warning has been spreading through the social networks reporting of a worm hidden in fake Twitter invite emails. Symantec releases that the malicious email has a attachment which when downloaded unleashed a viscous worm that captures your email addresses and digs its way into your removable hard drives and shared folders.

Look out for email saying “Your friend invited you to twitter!”, and the fake Twitter email address is invitations @twitter.com. Instead of a link the email carries an attachment with a zip file. One downloaded onto your computer havoc will ensue.

The issue with this worm is that it isn’t spreading through the Twitter.com website or through Twitter accounts. This worm uses the overall popularity of Twitter so that people not on Twitter will open it and download the attachment.

If you do get the email mark it as spam and don’t download anything.