Web traffic analytics firm spider.io discovered a botnet, which has more than 120 thousand hosts around the U.S. All bots run by Microsoft Windows and use Internet Explorer for web-browsing. Botnet activity causes damage to advertising agencies. The sum of losses is about $ 6.2 million per month.
“Chameleon is a sophisticated botnet,” the researchers stated. "Bots generate click traces indicative of normal users. Bots also generate client-side events indicative of normal user engagement. They click on ad impressions with an average click-through rate of 0.02%; and they surprisingly generate mouse traces across 11% of ad impressions.”
The botnet targets a cluster of 202 sites. The experts monitored Chameleon’s activity since last December. The botnet is the first one spotted to affect display ad advertisers instead of text link ones.
“All the bot browsers report themselves as being Internet Explorer 9.0 running on Windows 7. The bots visit the same set of websites, with little variation. The bots generate uniformly random click co-ordinates across ad impressions and the bots also generate randomised mouse traces”, researchers claim.
Spider.io provided a list of 5 thousand IP-addresses of the worst bots which are the part of Chameleon.
Spider.io report is available here.
