Tag Archives: increasing

UK Police Arrest 2 Over ZeuS Trojan

British police said today they have made Europe's first arrests in the battle against an online Trojan which threatened to compromise thousands of computers in the UK. The ZeuS or Zbot Trojan, a type of sophisticated malicious malware, is believed to have infected and accessed personal information from tens of thousands of computers around the world. The Trojan was configured in a way that when installed in the systems of infected computers, it recorded users' online bank account details and passwords, credit card numbers and other personal information, including passwords for social networking sites, before causing the computer to forward data to servers under the control of distributors. Officers from the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit (PceU), said on November 3, they arrested a man and a woman, both 20 years old, in Manchester. Both suspects have been released on bail pending further investigation. "The ZeuS Trojan is a piece of malware used increasingly by criminals to obtain huge quantities of sensitive information from thousands of compromised computers around the world," said Detective Inspector Colin Wetherill of the PceU . "The arrests represent a considerable breakthrough in our increasing efforts to combat online criminality." Police said computer users' should take the following measures to protect against malware: Continue reading

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Botnets Driving Click fraud Traffic

There was a significant jump in click fraud traffic from botnets in the third quarter of 2009, according to the latest data from Click Forensics. Click Forensics told WebProNews that the amount of click fraud traffic from botnets generally hovers around 33 percent, and it believes the sudden rise may be to due to the increasing sophistication and proliferation of botnets. Botnets accounted for 42.6 percent of all click fraud in Q3 2009, more than doubling in the past two years and up from the 27.5 percent reported for the same quarter last year. The overall industry average click fraud rate was 14.1 percent. That's up from 12.7 percent for Q2 2009 and down from the 16 percent rate reported for Q3 2008. In Q3, the countries outside North America producing the greatest volume of click fraud were the United Kingdom, Vietnam and Germany, respectively. "The significant rise in botnet-generated click fraud lines up with recent findings of several well-known malware and online fraud tracking experts," said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics . "Botnets perpetrating click fraud and other online schemes continue to grow in number and sophistication. Advertisers and ad providers need to be especially vigilant about such activity as we enter the competitive search marketing holiday season." Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged Business, competitive, countries, forensics, greatest, greatest-volume, increasing, north, north-america, online, online-schemes, review and story, united, united-kingdom, vietnam | Leave a comment