Google and Yahoo don’t mind Bahama Botnet’s stealing their revenue

 Researchers at Click Forensics said that a newly discovered botnet steals ad revenue away from Google, Yahoo! and Bing and directs it to smaller networks. According to the research zombie machines that are art of the so-called Bahama Botnet are infected with malware which sends their users to bogus pages instead of legal ones. The pages look authentic and due to DNS poisoning routines they even show google.com yahoo.com or bing.com in the address bar.

But in fact as the experts note the search result so these pages have been significantly shuffled. While links in the results lead to real sites browsers first redirect a user to a series of ad networks that receive a small referral fee. Besides, the researchers also found that sponsored links that usually pay the real search engine each time they are clicked were also adjusted so that smaller ad networks could be paid.

"The idea is to make money through click fraud," said Matt Graham, a risk analyst at Click Forensics that provides auditing services to advertisers. "When those people actually do searches, that's when these guys can display these ads hidden in the organic search results."

A Google spokeswoman said: "We are investigating and monitoring this issue just as we investigate and monitor many other botnets and schemes every day." A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment and representatives from Yahoo hadn't responded by time of writing.

The Bahama Botnet was called this way because of its origin. It has been already used to promote rogue anti-virus ads that were most recently injected into the website of The New York Times. Besides, this botnet was also exploited top send Interne users to malicious destinations when they were searching for certain topics.

At the moment top search engine companies are rather comfortable and sure that the threat is not serious. Graham said the number of infected machines he's observed is in the thousands. But still there are no guarantees for that this malicious network would not grow into something really to fear of.