Beware! Cyber Criminals Spreading Click Fraud Trojan for Making Money

Before Ransomware, Click fraud was one of the popular and efficient ways for cybercriminals to make money and with the explosive growth in the size of the online threats it is still making its way on the Internet. “Click-Fraud” is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser’s budget. Besides the search results, we all have seen advertisements placed in the search engine’s WebPage. If the visitor clicks the Ad, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine. A problem that has arisen with pay-per-click is results in Click-Fraud. The term “fraud” is used because in either case, the advertiser is paying for a click without receiving any true value. Of course, the number of clicks has to be large enough in order to gain a considerable amount of money, and in order to do that an attacker can use an automated script or malicious program to simulate multiple clicks by a browser on an ad. Trojan.Viknok was first observed by the security researchers in April 2013. The researchers considered the malware as a sophisticated threat because it has the ability to turn victims’ computer into a botnet. To do this, the malware is capable of gaining the elevated operating system privilege in order to infect system files on multiple Windows operating systems, including the 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista and 7. 
Then these Viknok-infected computer botnet zombies are allegedly used by cybercriminals to carry out Ad-Click Fraud and to pull more money the scammers are trying to add more victims’ computers to their botnet. “The scammers behind the current Viknok campaign have gone to a lot of effort to add more victims to their Adclick botnet, helping them make more money in the process,” states the blog post. In the last six months, there has been an increase in the use of this threat by cyber criminals and in many cases, the victims infected with the Trojan report hearing audio clips through their computers’ speakers. HOW THE VIKNOK INFECTS COMPUTERS
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YxdKE0UjpWA/U2-XTzbsUVI/AAAAAAAAblc/1XzsaczZ7sU/s728/click-fraud-malware.jpg Full Article