‘ZeroAccess’ Click-Fraud Botnet Disrupted, but Not Dead Yet
The lawsuit, filed on Nov. 25, alleges that the defendants also used the infected computers to commit identify theft and DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks. A notice announcing the lawsuit is written in both English and Russian, indicating the suspected language of some of the accused.
Online advertiser spend hit $20.1 billion in the U.S. in the first half of this year, according to the lawsuit. The industry’s “size and rapid growth combined with its highly technical and organizational complexity has made online advertising a rich environment for cybercriminals,” the suit said.
In click-fraud scams, advertisers end up paying for bogus clicks generated by software. The traffic from infected computers is sold by cybercriminals to other people running websites, who benefit by collecting fraudulent advertising revenue.
The U.S. federal court allowed Microsoft and investigators to block communication between the botnet and U.S.-based computers and take control of 49 domain names used by the botnet.
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