What are hitbots ???

Hi there, stumbled on the topic in question while wondering abt "how some sites(excluding those of filmstars) manage to get millions of hits in a specific period? " and here's what I found.

Hitbots or clickbots as they are usually called are little programs that constantly hit a site to create fictional traffic. Its used in pay-per-click fraud quite a lot. Click fraud (sometimes called pay-per-click fraud) is the practice of artificially inflating traffic statistics to defraud advertisers or Web sites that provide venues for advertisers. In the common pay-per-click advertising model, advertisers pay a fee for each click on their link. According to a CNET(an Internet-based media company based in San Francisco, California) News article, the average fee is about 45 cents, while some industry segments have costs-per-click of several dollars. By using automated clicking programs (called hitbots) to click the links, the perpetrators create the illusion that a large number of potential customers are clicking the advertiser's links, when in fact there is no likelihood that any of the clicks will lead to profit for the advertiser.

The programs used initially, resided on a single computer n repeatedly clicked on ads, but these were usually easily detectedbecause of the clicks coming from a single IP address.These cud be stopped by using .htaccess or using cookies or javascript.

But the ones used @ present are run on a network of different systems mostly in a virus style "malware " that turns the computer in question into a zombie. In short, they take over the computer and use it for their own purposes. Since this creates thousands of different computers with different IPs that have no obvious connection to the computer in question, they are much harder to detect.

For the non-techies, a malware is short for malicious software, software designed specifically to damage or disrupt a system, such as a virus or a Trojan horse.

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