The Bahama botnet is a Robin Hood of sorts.

History has a way of turning common thieves into romantic heroes. A band of woodland poachers in the Middle Ages becomes Robin Hood and His Merry Men. A crew of border state marauders becomes re-distributors of wealth on horseback led by Jesse James. A Depression Era pair of bank robbers becomes two lovebirds salting the salt of the earth with purloined cash as Bonnie and Clyde. And now we have the Bahama botnet.

While the Bahama botnet may not have the joie de vivre of a Robin of Locksley or the grit of the James boys or the youthful rebelliousness of “Romeo and Juliet in a Getaway Car”–after all it’s only a computer program–it does share a common characteristic with those outlaws. It robs from the rich to give to the poor–sort of.

“We have conducted additional research into the behavior of the Bahama botnet and found that it acts as a sort of perverted ‘Robin Hood’ among ad networks by robbing ad revenue from the top-tier players and delivering fraudulent traffic to second- and third-tier ad networks and publishers,” Matt Graham, of  Click Forensics, an Internet advertising traffic analysis firm, reported in the company’s blog last week.

One of the top-tier players gypped by the bot, Click Forensics revealed, is the Big Cahuna of clicks-into-cash, Google. Here’s how the malware does it.

Continue reading “Robin Hood” botnet siphoning Google traffic