How to Defraud Display Advertisers with Zeus

Advertisers are actually more aware of this than the author writes, I think he&#x27;s just being politically correct. They&#x27;re also aware of how inneficient offline media (TV, billboards) are.<p>I think this is just another case of &quot;no one ever got fired for buying IBM&quot;, e.g. &quot;no one ever got fired for advertising on TV or buying Google Ads or doing what the agency told them to do&quot;.<p>Solving this problem is not yet, unfortunately, a priority for advertisers. I wonder for how long.

It would be interesting to try and build a signature of the malware invisible windows. When loading an IE browser are there any signs that the page is not visible... would something like <a href="https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Valve&#x2F;fingerprintjs</a> uniquely detect the hidden IE windows?<p>[EDIT] another thing that could be helpful in building a signature is: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1060008/is-there-a-way-to-detect-if-a-browser-window-is-not-currently-active" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1060008&#x2F;is-there-a-way-to...</a>

It seems to me that defrauding online advertisers has been a global sport since advertising started polluting the web.<p>If only this could get so massively out of hands that advertisers gave up altogether on polluting the web and wasting internet bandwidth and computer resources. Then maybe google would become a search engine again and provide relevant search results, at the very least the internet would be less a global surveillance tool it has become people don&#x27;t care enough or are too clueless.

Very interesting read. Is it even possible to solve the problem if the publisher itself is fraudulent? Since they are the layer of communication and they will provide parameters to run your code, there is only so much you can do. It seems like once of those problems in which the damage is limited to a small percentage and the advertisers are kind of OK with it deploying too many resources to find a solution.