Sudden massive number of banner clicks

banners and clickthroughs

[TheWebographer]

We have a number of banner ads on our website that do very well in terms of click throughs. However suddenly they began doing TOO WELL which lead to me think something automated is visiting the website and "clicking" them.

I began logging the ip addresses of those who click on the banners and get ridiculous numbers of these 2 ip addresses:

66.65.98.212
162.84.203.253

They seem to "click" banners 5-15 times right in succession. And then come back a short time later to do it again. The page positions of our banners are randomly rotated which may explain why they will "click" on the same banner serveral times during these "banner clicking sessions".

Has anyone here had a similar problem?
What are these pesky bots up to?
What would be the best way to programattically combat this problem with an eye to other attempts by other ips in the future?

any ideas appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

[MarieC]

Do you know what user agent or browser was used? You could ban those particular IP addresses, or you could ban the bot. Do a site search here for htaccess for more infomation on banning.

[WebDawg]

Hi,

This is my first post. I am webmaster of a site which promotes visits to several casinos located in Quebec, Canada. I found this forum by doing a Google search for 162.84.203.253 :-)

I am also getting a ridiculous number of visits from 162.84.203.253 and 66.65.98.212. The referer is
Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+Win32;+WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5)

WinHttpRequest makes it easy to script HTTP requests, it is part of the Microsoft SOAP SDK. I am wondering if the person who is doing this has figured out a way to be paid for the clicks? I'm new to this, so I hope this isn't a dumb question!

Peace out!

[Edge]

You got a rouge robot, check out the perl ban bot script in this forum.

I've been searching for a method to limit an IP address to a particular number of page views per day. With this I figure I will limit un-wanted robots (sneaky) from burning up my bandwidth. Normally, a visitor that views more than 20 pages on my site is a robot.

[WebDawg]

Edge,

Thanks for your reply. I am also looking for a way to limit visits per day by IP address. We are running IIS with Websphere are on the back-end.

Another approach that seems to be very effective is to use "captchas", those distorted images of words that the user has to enter, similiar to a logon, to prove that they aren't robots. Yahoo uses such a program, called "E-Z Gimpy", to prevent robots from signing up for free E-Mail accounts. I'm trying to find open-source or commercial software for this purpose.

I am really concerned because we put up an online survey a while ago which ended up as a robot-voting frenzy. At one point we were getting something like 50000 votes a day from several robots voting against each other!

Regards,
WD