How Fixing Broken Windows Can Decrease Click Fraud
There is a theory in law enforcement that goes something like this: If someone breaks a window in a building, and it isn’t fixed quickly, others will soon be broken. As the evidence of neglect builds, vandals will be more emboldened to break into the building and commit more vandalism and eventually destroy it completely. If, on the other hand, that window is promptly fixed, it discourages further crime because it is clear that someone is watching the store. Further, if instead of just fixing the window, you find the vandal and hold them accountable for it, a message goes out loud and clear: we’re watching and you will get caught. The problem with the broken windows theory is that it requires more than police action to put into practice. If the community isn’t involved in the cleanup effort, the initiative fails. When the community is drawn in to help police the problems, to report them and to ‘mind the store’, so to speak, crime rates drop. This theory can be extended to police nearly any venue where there is unacceptable behavior - including the problem of click fraud in the venue of PPC advertising. At the moment, the PPC industry is like a vacant building with nobody watching the store. It’s easy to enter fraudulent clicks. It’s even easier to get away with it. At the moment, a large percentage of advertisers leave the detection of fraudulent clicks up to the PPC provider - and the policy of most PPC providers is that they will provide refunds for proven click fraud upon request from the advertiser. What happens when: - The PPC provider’s software detection methods don’t catch the click fraud? - The advertiser doesn’t use fraud detection software? - The advertiser can’t back up the claim of click fraud? - The major players in the industry refer to the problem as ‘negligible’? Simply put - the click fraudster gets away with it. The rewards are enormous - estimates put the amount of money lost to click fraud in the range of billions of dollars annually. But the loss to any individual advertiser is usually negligible, and even Google sees refunding money to advertisers as no more than the cost of doing business. If we’re ever going to put a dent in click fraud, three things have to happen. 1. Advertisers have to take responsibility for monitoring their own campaigns. If you don’t know it’s happening, you can’t take steps to stop it. 2. Advertisers need to use the information they generate through their analytics to demand refunds from the PPC companies on a consistent basis. As long as the losses are minor compared to the profits for the PPC companies, their incentive for responding is limited. 3. Click fraud perpetrators have to be identified, actively pursued and penalized. Currently, modern techniques that use proxies and ‘zombie networks’ can make it almost impossible to identify and punish offenders. Those are the three elements of the Broken Window theory that make it work - community action, official backing and action and penalizing perpetrators. The first element in combating click fraud as a community is in getting click fraud prevention and tracking software into the hands of all advertisers. The difficulty of sifting through hundreds of pages of data to make comparisons and weed out patterns that signal click fraud is a daunting one for most companies. Click fraud detection software makes it almost painless - but can be expensive. Other parts of the internet market have benefited from open sourcing of software to manage content, manipulate graphics, and create communities and process payments. An open offering of free click fraud prevention software will encourage advertisers to start monitoring their own logs and records and identify potential fraudulent clicks. In addition, an open offering encourages others to modify and extend the software and make those extensions available to the community at large. With those monitors in place, the second part of the equation becomes more possible. When it’s easy for advertisers to identify and document fraudulent clicks on their campaigns, it becomes that much easier for them to demand refunds for those clicks. The third part is an outgrowth of creating a community that actively works to eliminate click fraud. For the time being, click fraudsters are loose in a neighborhood of broken windows. With the right tools, we can begin to repair the windows and create a community that makes it nearly impossible to get away with their tactics. Jay Stockwell has been fighting click fraud since 1999. In 2004 he developed the first version of Click Sentinel which was released 6 months later to critical acclaim. His release of <a href="http://www.clicksentinel.com">Click Sentinel</a> (Version 2) redefines how click fraud should be addressed.
Source: www.ArticlePros.com
Computer Viruses: The Nasty Truth
The term, ?virus?, in computer technology, refers to a self replicating application that spreads by making copies of itself by inserting into other programs, other executables or documents, and when executed begins to perform harmful actions on the system. All computer viruses are deliberately created, not always malicious and some of them may be benign and simply annoying. Non-Memory Resident and Memory Resident Viruses: Non-Memory resident viruses, when they are executed, immediately look for other hosts that can be infected. When they infect these targets, they transfer control to the application program they infected. A non-resident virus has a finder module and a replication module. The finder module, once it finds a new file to infect, calls upon the replication module to infect that file. Memory-Resident virus stays in the memory and do not look for hosts to infect when they are executed. It stays active in the background after its host program is terminated, and infects files as soon as they are opened or accessed by other programs or the operating system. It does have the replication module like the non-memory resident virus, but without the finder module. Types of Computer Viruses: File Viruses: These types of viruses are the most common, and mostly infect open files and program libraries on an operating system. The virus functions by inserting itself into a host file, modifies it in such a way that the virus is executed when the file is opened. They are also known as left viruses. Today, there are known viruses infecting all kinds of executables of standard DOS: batch command files (BAT), loadable drivers (SYS, including special purpose files IO.SYS and MS- DOS.SYS) and binary executables (EXE, COM). There are also viruses targeting executables of other operating systems - Windows 3.x, Windows95/NT, OS/2, Macintosh, Unix, including the VxD drivers of Windows 3.x and Windows95. Macro viruses: Macros are used in most word processing programs such as Microsoft Office in order to automate or simplify recurring tasks in documents. Macro viruses are those viruses that use the application’s own macro programming language to distribute themselves, in which an unwanted sequence of actions is performed automatically when the application is started or something else triggers it. These macro viruses may inflict damage to the document or to other computer software but are relatively harmless, and are often spread as an e-mail virus. Boot Viruses: These were one of the most common viruses prevalent during the early and mid 1990s, when the use of diskettes was popular. These viruses infect or substitute their own code for either the DOS boot sector or the Master Boot Record (MBR), which controls the boot sequence of the PC. The MBR is executed every time a computer is booted so the virus will also be loaded into memory on every startup and spreads to every disk that the system reads. They are typically very difficult to remove, and most antivirus programs cannot clean the MBR while Windows is running. So, bootable antivirus disks are needed to fix boot sector viruses. Script viruses: They are a division of file viruses, written in a variety of script languages such as VBS, JavaScript, BAT, PHP, HTML etc. They can form a part of multi-component viruses or infect other scripts such as Windows or Linux command and service files. If the file format, such as HTML, allows the execution of scripts, they can infect it. Antivirus HQ: your online resource to help protect your PC from <a href="http://antivirus-hq.com/">viruses and spyware</a>.
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