Law enforcement in many European countries served warrants at the same time, seizing servers expected to contain more evidence about the leaders of the ZeroAccess crime ring, which was devoted to "click fraud."
Such rings use networks of captive machines, known as botnets, in complicated schemes that force them to click on ads without the computer owners' knowledge. The schemes cheat advertisers on search engines including Microsoft's Bing by making them pay for interactions that have no chance of leading to a sale. Microsoft said the botnet had been costing advertisers on Bing, Google Inc and Yahoo Inc an estimated $2.7 million monthly.
The coordinated effort marks the eighth time Microsoft has moved against a botnet and a rare instance of it doing serious damage to one that is controlled with a peer-to-peer mechanism, where infected machines give each other instructions instead of relying on a central server that defenders can hunt down and disable.
But the ZeroAccess botnet still had a weakness: The code in the infected machines told them to reach out to one of the 18 numeric Internet addresses for details on which ads to click.
Microsoft recently opened a new Cybercrime Center in Redmond and is using new tools in its efforts. They are helped by a provision in trademark that allows pretrial seizure of suspected counterfeit goods, including websites that, as in the present case, are spreading tainted versions of the Internet Explorer browser. ..../-
Law enforcement in many European countries served warrants at the same time, seizing servers expected to contain more evidence about the leaders of the ZeroAccess crime ring, which was devoted to "click fraud."
ReplyDeleteSuch rings use networks of captive machines, known as botnets, in complicated schemes that force them to click on ads without the computer owners' knowledge. The schemes cheat advertisers on search engines including Microsoft's Bing by making them pay for interactions that have no chance of leading to a sale. Microsoft said the botnet had been costing advertisers on Bing, Google Inc and Yahoo Inc an estimated $2.7 million monthly.
The coordinated effort marks the eighth time Microsoft has moved against a botnet and a rare instance of it doing serious damage to one that is controlled with a peer-to-peer mechanism, where infected machines give each other instructions instead of relying on a central server that defenders can hunt down and disable.
But the ZeroAccess botnet still had a weakness: The code in the infected machines told them to reach out to one of the 18 numeric Internet addresses for details on which ads to click.
Microsoft recently opened a new Cybercrime Center in Redmond and is using new tools in its efforts. They are helped by a provision in trademark that allows pretrial seizure of suspected counterfeit goods, including websites that, as in the present case, are spreading tainted versions of the Internet Explorer browser.
..../-