Forum Moderators: open
The LURHQ article explains it best (mods, please excuse the URL!) - [lurhq.com...]
I think all the the ad networks are guilty of here is being sloppy by the way, however if you read this in conjunction with recent complaints of click fraud, particularly against FindWhat, then perhaps there's a tie-up between the DNS Cache Poisoning attacks and alleged click fraud.
Any thoughts?
"It doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine that the persons responsible for the DNS hijacking could be apprehended simply by serving FindWhat with a subpoena to find out where they've been sending the checks for the affiliate IDs being passed in the search redirects. However, this activity has persisted for years now without much law enforcement interest, and as each new affiliate comes on board they invent their own scheme to abuse the PPC system. Clearly it seems that through the chain of advertiser to consumer and back again, the end user is ultimately paying to have him or herself hijacked."
This may end up being the defense employed by the PPC providers in the Lane suit. Unscrupulous rogue affiliates abusing the system.
FindWhat did mention cutting "unproductive" affiliates from the system in Q4. Hopefully their intent was to thwart this practice.
DNS Cache Poisoning
I say we sue all of the idiot sysadmins who are too stupid to patch an 8 year old bug.
This vulnerability was first discussed in 1993, and the first outbreak was in 1997.
