Around the Net
Botnet Cost Ad Industry $6.2 Million
- spider.io, Tuesday, March 19, 2013 3:39 PM
A London-based startup tracking Web browsing activity estimates that traffic from the Chameleon botnet accounts for nearly two-thirds of the total visits to certain Web sites, inflating the number of page views and advertising revenue, according to spider.io. The botnet emulates human visitors on select Web sites, causing an estimated $6.2 million in lost revenue from billions of display ad impressions at about $0.69 CPM on average. The company claims that more than 120,000 host machines have been identified so far, and 95% of these machines access the Web from residential U.S. IP addresses.
