Yesterday was security day at Google, they even gave away 2GB of storage to those who went through a simple security questionnaire on their Google account. On the ad network side, Google announced they have automated the blocking of traffic from the top three fraud botnets. These three botnets accounted for over 500,000 infected machines.
Google said "today we're further reinforcing our existing botnet defenses across our ad systems through a new feature that automates the filtering of traffic from three of the top ad fraud botnets, amongst those we are monitoring and defending against." "One of the key benefits of this new feature is that it is resilient to possible changes to the malware that generates this botnet traffic," they added.
What are botnets? Google explained:
Ad fraud botnets are armies of malware-infected computers that are controlled by malicious fraudsters intent on generating large amounts of non-human ad traffic volume, typically for unscrupulous publishers. As a result, ad fraud botnets are a major threat to the budgets of advertisers, the reputation of publishers, and the safety of consumers. And this threat is considerable, given that hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe are infected with malware used specifically for ad fraud.
They made a point to call out one of the botnets named Bedep and as well as the other two were named Beetal and Changthangi.
Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help and Google+.
