Top all-time · #5587
spider.io
Company blog · spider.io/blogsecurity
spider.io is the company blog at spider.io, writing about security. Since 2011, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Discovered: Botnet Costing Display Advertisers over $6,000,000 per Month”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link spider.io's blog for research on bot traffic and ad fraud, such as the Chameleon botnet study. Commenters cite it as a source for claims about fake web traffic.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Discovered: Botnet Costing Display Advertisers over $6,000,000 per Month5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-03-19
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-18
- /blog/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-12-15
- Any page loaded in IE can track your mouse movements anywhere2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-12-12
What Hacker News says?
London, UK - Full Time - http://spider.io At spider.io, we look to catch bad people doing very bad things. We catch botnets, browser emulators, clickjackers, traffic launderers, bots that probe for weakness, bots that learn. At spider.io, we look to distinguish legitimate human website visitors from nefarious automated traffic. It’s a hard engineering problem. It would be a hard problem at toy levels of traffic. We…
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (November 2011)”Submitted Any page loaded in IE can track your mouse movements anywhere as a story · 292 points
HN discussionHere's the source of the Chameleon botnet details: http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5400573
Comment linking /blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/
on “Uncovering an advertising fraud scheme (NSFW) (2011)”Submitted Discovered: Botnet Costing Display Advertisers over $6,000,000 per Month as a story · 128 points
HN discussionIHMO, preventing site scraping is really really hard. There are couple of startups that offer products that claim to stop site scraping.[1] 1. Ajaxified paginated data -> With Firebug looking at XHR requests, one can easily reverse engineer the ajax call and extract data directly from the json - in fact you are making the scraper's life easier as you will probably be storing the information in a structured manner in…
Comment linking /
on “Preventing Site Scraping”Submitted How to Defraud Display Advertisers with Zeus as a story · 61 points
HN discussionI think that's what is being sold, and is what the report is promoting. As a product and company, they remind me of http://spider.io who did a similar thing and were acquired by Google. I was interested in using the technology to fight comment spam on blogs and forums, but it was really tailored for detecting fraudulent clicks and impressions on adverts and Google were quick to acquire. Some of the spider.io blog is…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds”Submitted The Problem With Client-Side Analytics as a story · 37 points
HN discussionSpider.io used to release quite a few studies on this. One such: http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/ But they got bought over by Google recently - Didn't think Google would need to acquire a team around fraud detection and prevention - GOOG pretty much wrote the book on Click Fraud. Personally felt it was a deal done more to prevent the release of such articles that might harm the Online Ad World or…
Comment linking /blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/
on “Here Comes Facebook’s Ad Network: Mobile Ads Launching This Month”Submitted Startups Acquiring Startups for Equity as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis seems pretty much exactly like http://spider.io , now acquired by Google.
Comment linking /
on “A Startup With a Way to Filter Botnet Traffic Gets Funding”Submitted Extreme Architecting as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHow many use Selenium specifically? No. It was just a random example that was intended to not point in an easily weaponized direction. I figured it was both common and known in tech circles that Flash/Javascript executing botnets for ads existed and have for year(s): http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/ They were acquired by Google so it isn't just random blog spam: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/go…
Comment linking /blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/
on “A Startup With a Way to Filter Botnet Traffic Gets Funding”Submitted Cyber Criminals Defraud Display Advertisers with TDSS as a story · 3 points
HN discussionthat's good point. It would be nice to see someone who does not have a vested interest in under or over reporting the number of bots on the web take a good crack at this number. Per spider.io, bots are ripping off advertisers left and right. That being said, scared advertisers are the target market for their products. http://www.spider.io/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human”Submitted The first spider.io physical hackday: bar-building as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe issue was reported in October. "Whilst the Microsoft Security Research Center has acknowledged the vulnerability in Internet Explorer, they have also stated that there are no immediate plans to patch this vulnerability in existing versions of the browser." http://spider.io/blog/2012/12/internet-explorer-data-leakage... So, instead of fixing it: - receive vulnerability report - don't fix it and wait until there's…
Comment linking /blog/2012/12/internet-explorer-data-leakage/
on “Microsoft responds to IE mouse tracking vulnerability”Your gut is probably correct. Sounds like PPV Networks. Resources: http://www.doubleverify.com/ http://www.mdotlabs.com/ http://www.spider.io/ http://integralads.com/ Good luck and report back. Expose them right here on HN.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Rule of thumb for identfying fake web traffic”Sorry for linking to the wrong place, here's the sauce: http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/
Comment linking /blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/
on “Massive Botnet discovered siphoning $6 million monthly from online advertising”
