Adsense Killer

If someone were to constantly write computer worms that randomly clicked on Adsense blocks found in webpages the infected computer visited at a rate of maybe 1 click per 10 pages visited, how could Google defend itself against this without pissing off either advertisers or publishers ?

They couldn't keep it a secret, even if google were able to get sites like Symantec to keep it off of their alerts, independant researchers & blogs could not be silenced.

It wouldn't be financially motivated, it would just click everyones ads randomly.

Would it "physical" click or request a page inside of itself? Google doesnt supply direct links in its ads, so it cant scan the soruce code.

in theory,

it could scan the source for the ads scripy, then approximate the mouse index to click on according to browser type and resolution... just click everywhere within the estimated index and walla, watch for execution to know when to stop...

but how do you keep the worm off the radar

they'll track it down and you'll go to jail

unless you constantly bounced and changed IP's through proxies


i know this is a theoretical what if, but it is possible.

scary huh


*plum* like that will be the end of affiliate advertising

The attack would require intimate knowledge of at the very least one popular browsers inner workings to carry out.

Firefox would be easy to target because it's open source & growing in popularity.
You wouldn't need to find any flaws in the browser itself, you'ld just need to know how to manipulate the process and make the browser do things it could normally do.

You could hijack the browsers javascript parser and watch for known adsense display functions, then get details to work with from there.

oh your good