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Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#51

Post by throwawayads »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #38
bsaul wrote: post #34

People complain a lot about Google here, but some people working in the business for a while will remember the miva ad network. Boy was that network ugly. Sometimes during the month you would see a bump of traffic of 100x magnitude on all customers and of course no conversion at all. We used to say "looks like miva needs some cash this month". Google adwords/adsense didn't win by being a monopoly, they won because th…

This. Exactly. Google enjoys a natural monopoly (or in my view, a non-monopoly) in search because they continue to earn the most business there, not because they have eliminated viable alternatives.

Yes - but now they do a lot of the classic "use a good product in one to gain an advantage in another" tricks - https://medium.com/@ad_insider/googles-latest-monopoly-trick...

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#52

Post by eli »

I suspect I was a victim of a version of this fraud years ago. Lots of suspicious clicks off of strange queries or weird AdSense blogs (the latter might have been the more straightforward AdSense fraud) and the visitors rarely engaged with more than one page.

Google insisted that if there are any fraudulent clicks, they are detected automatically and we are not be charged for them. But it was essentially impossible to know if that's true. I guess it doesn't really matter: at the end of the day you tally up your metrics and AdWords is either worth it or not. Still a very frustrating experience.

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#53

Post by zo1 »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #39
zo1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, I'd like to add this bit of information: People get up in arms when a large "corporation" or "well-established player" in the market throws their capital weight around to bud out budding investors by selling at a loss. But, as you can see in this thread, they turnaround and have a completely different take on the matter when it's a "VC-backed startup" using its newly-acquired capital to drown out competi…

This is why we need anti-trust law. There are cases where throwing your capital around is appropriate, and there are cases where it is anti-competitive.

"There are cases where throwing your capital around is appropriate"

I'm curious where you think this is the case? Remember, your arbitrary definition of appropriate might not be the same as others'. I probably won't go either way, as I think anti-trust laws in general are not appropriate, but that's a different discussion.

Moreover, may I ask what your moral argument is for such laws? From the looks of it, most people would say: "If you have a lot of money, then you're not allowed to use it to your advantage if we perceive it as predatory". With such vague terms (unless you can make it more explicit), and it will most certainly end up having a favoritist bureaucracy grow around it.

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#54

Post by sleep-less »

DonPellegrino wrote: post #23

This reminds me of a nasty attack I learned about recently. I run http://unblock.us.org , a DNS/anti-censorship server. Unblock does tunneling for censored websites. There are scripts out there that scan the whole internet for servers that accept HTTP and HTTPS requests to proxy. Those scripts are set up to simultaneously HTTP(S) GET tons of doubleclick.net etc. URLs to get the site owner kicked off Google Ads. I can…

How can your server blacklist requests to doubleclick.net?

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#55

Post by tim333 »

logicallee wrote: post #46
Throwaway823 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a user with a grudge that was banned from the service. They attempted to use a number of online point and click tools to attack the site, until I eventually banned their IP address, and then talked with them and threatened legal action.

This whole thread people discuss technical mitigations, and I'm thinking "man, this is such a clear case where a bit of law and the tiniest amount of civil damages totally would fix the situation, as long as the attacking person lives in a country with a level of rule of law." What a waste of resources trying to make something impossible, rather than just illegal. (I was thinking mostly of the anticompetitive acts an…

Trouble is a lot of attacks come from places like Russia where it is not convenient to travel to file a legal case.

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#56

Post by DonPellegrino »

sleep-less wrote: post #54
DonPellegrino wrote: post #23

This reminds me of a nasty attack I learned about recently. I run http://unblock.us.org , a DNS/anti-censorship server. Unblock does tunneling for censored websites. There are scripts out there that scan the whole internet for servers that accept HTTP and HTTPS requests to proxy. Those scripts are set up to simultaneously HTTP(S) GET tons of doubleclick.net etc. URLs to get the site owner kicked off Google Ads. I can…

How can your server blacklist requests to doubleclick.net?

I don't tunnel HTTP/HTTPS requests to doubleclick.net at all to begin with (I use a whitelist for HTTP/HTTS), but if someone were to do too many DNS requests for the same domain in a short period of time I drop those requests as it means the Source IP I'm seeing is actually the IP of the victim of a DNS Amplification attack and sending them the response would make me a participant in that attack.

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #38
bsaul wrote: post #34

People complain a lot about Google here, but some people working in the business for a while will remember the miva ad network. Boy was that network ugly. Sometimes during the month you would see a bump of traffic of 100x magnitude on all customers and of course no conversion at all. We used to say "looks like miva needs some cash this month". Google adwords/adsense didn't win by being a monopoly, they won because th…

This. Exactly. Google enjoys a natural monopoly (or in my view, a non-monopoly) in search because they continue to earn the most business there, not because they have eliminated viable alternatives.

Same with webmail. And maps. And other things. They just provide services that work and are optimized for usability, not for trying to upsell you something. I believe they deserve that natural monopoly for doing what they are (as long as they continue this course).

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#58

Post by cbr »

Throwaway823 wrote: post #22

Slightly different, but I had a user attempt to get my AdSense account banned by repeatedly clicking ads for days. Sadly, for the advertisers, Google didn't do a thing. This user racked up close to 10,000 clicks, my earnings skyrocketed for a day or two, and I contacted Google with clear evidence pointing to a particular IP address, and explained the situation in-depth with server logs. This was submitted through the…

    Those advertisers paid for thousands of fake clicks,
    and I ended up with a decent chunk of change.
I see how you know the second one, but how do you know the first? Maybe they have a grey area of fraud detection where they pay the publisher but don't charge the advertiser?

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#59

Post by unclebucknasty »

DonPellegrino wrote: post #23

This reminds me of a nasty attack I learned about recently. I run http://unblock.us.org , a DNS/anti-censorship server. Unblock does tunneling for censored websites. There are scripts out there that scan the whole internet for servers that accept HTTP and HTTPS requests to proxy. Those scripts are set up to simultaneously HTTP(S) GET tons of doubleclick.net etc. URLs to get the site owner kicked off Google Ads. I can…

>but I was shocked at the ease of carrying that kind of attack

From affiliate marketing to PPC ad networks, etc., the implementing systems tend to be built as naively as possible. When you survey the implementations you quickly realize that the designers assume there are no bad actors in the known universe. Literally no thought was given to fraud.

They generally tend to be wide open to abuse, and frequently through simple URL manipulation/automation and standard HTML.

What's amazing is that billions of dollars are at stake, requiring little more than mouse-clicks. So, given that clicks are so insanely easy to simulate, you would think that these systems would be very robust; yet they are frequently the opposite. But, beyond the naivete, it is not entirely the networks' fault. They are locked in a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse with people who have very little to lose and much to gain.

Re: Service drains competitor's Adwords budget

#60

Post by grey-area »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #37
grey-area wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they have a monopoly on advertising it's not really in their interest any more to detect click fraud.

They do not hold a monopoly on advertising. They hold the majority of the business, for now, but the structure of how and why they have that business is not monopolistic. Source: Dearth of legal action from competitors or DOJ. And make no mistake -- their competitors are litigious as fuck.

Yes, it's a slippery term so probably not the best word to use, however the majority of display and search ads are served by google and unfortunately this does mean they have little incentive to actually address click fraud, though they do obviously make some efforts, we wouldn't hear stories like the parent post if those efforts were effective. Fraud was reported and went completely unaddressed - that's not really acceptable to my mind and indicates they feel little pressure to mitigate it as that's not an isolated report.

Re the absence of lawsuits, I'm not sure that is positive proof of anything.

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