Fraudsters Use Amazon’s Cloud to Create Fake Web Traffic
June 5, 2015
Grazed from WSJ. Author: Jack Marshall.
Amazon.com’s cloud computing service has become a popular conduit for fraudsters looking to create “bot” traffic and disseminate it over the Web, according to new research from advertising fraud detection firm Fraudlogix.
Fraudsters use computer generated bots to mimic the actions of real consumers and trick marketers into paying for ads displayed on Web pages. A number of techniques are used to generate artificial traffic, such as infecting consumers’ personal computers with software that loads Web pages without their knowledge, or installing similar software on cloud computing services such as Amazon’s to simulate real users…
To get a sense of how non-human or “bot” traffic moves around the Web, fraud detection firm Fraudlogix examined two billion ad impressions over the course of a 30-day period from early March to early April. Those impressions were delivered to nearly 64 million unique IP addresses, which Flaudlogix checked against its own fraud database to categorize them as “good” or “bad.”…
Read more from the source @ http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/06/05/fraudsters-use-amazons-cloud-to-create-fake-web-traffic/