Botnets strangle Google Adwords campaigns

[techygeek]

Would this have any effect on adsense ECM?
Security researchers have discovered a way to shut down or seriously impair a Google Adwords advertising campaign by artificially inflating the number of times an ad is displayed. By running searches against particular keywords from compromised hosts, attackers can cause click-through percentage rates to fall through the floor.

This, in turn, causes Google Adwords to automatically disable the affected campaign keywords and prevent ads from being displayed. By disabling campaign keywords using the technique, cybercrimals could give their preferred parties higher ad positions at reduced costs, according to click fraud prevention specialists Clickrisk.

[anallawalla]

I have read this theory but it only makes sense if the "customer" of this clickbot service has no ads appearing on those pages during the attack period.

When Google made the change to show dozens of ads on a SERP with 100 results, it crossed my mind that many more ads were getting an extra impression, which is technically true. I haven't decided if that is good or bad for the advertisers.