A million machines enslaved by MitM Google ad fraud botnet

About a million computers have been enslaved into a newly-identified botnet that is plundering Google advertising revenues, a security trio says. The redirector.paco botnet steals advertising revenue by replacing a website's Google AdSense for search results on infected machines with their own. Bitdefender security …

[mythicalduck]

newly-identified botnet that is plundering Google advertising revenues

My heart bleeds...

The malware is hiding in infected software packages including Youtube Downloader

Do we know which YouTube Downloader? And from official sources?

[J Bourne]

Let me fix that for you...

A million Windows machines enslaved by MitM Google ad fraud botnet

There, that's better isn't it?

[Aodhhan]

Good information from Bitdefender Labs

Unfortunately, Mr. Pauli 'f-ups' another bit of good information. He did the same thing yesterday with a couple of articles. Tries to come up with cute phrases which aren't just misleading, it's likely false.

1) The botnet doesn't "enslave" anything. The systems aren't out of the control of the owner, and still do what they have been created to do. If it was enslaved, they would be under the control of someone else.

2) If you're going to say something like it's causing a great deal of revenue loss, then you're making a statement which requires proof, or at least a reference backing your statement up.

The rest of the article is a poor job of cut and pasting from the original Bitdefender Labs blog which does a fantastic job of analyzing this botnet. Mr. Pauli would have done a better service to just state the facts, a brief who, what, where, when and then link the article.