Botnet caught stealing from Google, Yahoo and Bing
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 09 October 2009, 22:30 IST   |    1 Comments
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Botnet caught stealing from Google, Yahoo and Bing
San Francisco: A botnet called Bahama botnet has been caught stealing ad revenue from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing. The Bahama botnet leads the infected computer to a search page which looks authentic and takes the user to the real sites, but before doing so it forces them to go through several ad networks that receive a small referral fee, according to researchers at Click Forensics. The sponsored links, which pay the search engines each time they are clicked, have also been impacted as smaller ad network gets paid instead. "The idea is to make money through click fraud. When those people actually do searches, that's when these guys can display these ads hidden in the organic search results," said Matt Graham, a Risk Analyst at Click Forensics that provides auditing services to advertisers, to The Register. The fake websites have precisely the same look and feel as the real Google, Yahoo or Bing. But traffic analysis tools show the infected computer is really connected to an impostor server with the IP address of 64.86.17.56. A Google spokeswoman said: "We are investigating and monitoring this issue just as we investigate and monitor many other botnets and schemes every day." The Bahama Botnet is named so because initially used compromised servers for this botnet were from Bahama. This was the same botnet which was in some ways responsible for the rogue anti-virus ads that were found on The New York Times. The Bahama Botnet is known for its mastery of search engine optimization techniques that send people to malicious websites when they search for current events topics. Graham said the number of infected machines he's observed is in the thousands. It will be interesting to see how the three web giants respond to this new threat which is eating their ad revenues.

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