Botnet

An advertising analytics company said it has discovered a botnet that generates upwards of US$6 million per month by generating bogus clicks on display advertisements.

Spider.io, based in the U.K., wrote that the botnet code, called Chameleon, has infected about 120,000 residential computers in the U.S. and perpetrates click fraud on 202 websites that collectively deliver 14 billion ad impressions. Chameleon is responsible for 9 billion of those impressions, Spider.io said.

International authorities, with some help from Facebook, have arrested 10 people accused of operating a network of infected computers that stole personal information from millions of victims.

The Justice Department said Tuesday night that the F.B.I. and international agencies were helped in their investigations by Facebook, whose users were among those targeted by the malware, or malicious software, over the last several years. The agencies arrested people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Britain, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru and the United States, the F.B.I. said.

According to Microsoft's latest analysis, based on "sinkholes", only just over half of the 1.6 million PCs once infected with the Rustock bot are now clean.