Krebs on Security, the popular blog that addresses security issues and new cyber threats, launches an alarm for a new scam that targets website owners and managers who use the service AdSense Google to monetize its web traffic.
It's about a real extortion via email, which Krebs reports following the report of a user who received an email that threatened to send bogus traffic to his site in order to trigger Google's anti-fraud measures and thus compromise the revenues of AdSense advertisements. Threat that would not be maintained if the victim corresponds to Fr.$ 5000 bonus in bitcoin. Here is the email sent by the user, which we report in full and then translated below:
"Very soon the warning notice from above will appear at the dashboard of your AdSense account undoubtedly! This will happen due to the fact that were about to flood your site with huge amount of direct bot generated web traffic with 100% bounce ratio and thousands of IPs in rotation a nightmare for every AdSense publisher. More also well adjust our sophisticated bots to open, in endless cycle with different time duration, every AdSense banner which runs on your site. "
Very soon the warning will no doubt appear in the dasboard of your AdSense account! This will happen due to the fact that we are about to flood your site with a large amount of web traffic generated by bots with a 100% bounce ratio and thousands of rotating IPs – a nightmare for any AdSense publisher. In addition, we will adjust our sophisticated bots to open, in an infinite cycle with a different duration, any AdSense banner present on your site.
In the event that Google's systems detect a large amount of automated traffic to banners Anti-fraud protections would be triggered immediately, which can limit the delivery of the banner or the count of clicks going to damage the income of the owner of the site. Google, among other things, announced just last August some strengthening measures in its technologies and anti-fraud measures in order to protect the quality of its advertising networks with a more precise identification of invalid traffic.
The user who shared the information with the Krebs on Security blog says that despite considering the email as a sort of bluff, he also found from the statistics of his AdSense account that the detections that fall under the "Invalid traffic report" section they increased significantly compared to the previous month.
Google said it considers the threat of sabotage "extremely rare in practice", adding that its anti-fraud mechanisms still have protection mechanisms to prevent cases like this. In any case, those who manage a site and take advantage of Google's AdSense service can contact the help center to report any invalid click episode and if they think they have been the victim of a sabotage like that of this new scam.