Skewing is a type of botnet attack designed to alter some metric by repeatedly clicking links, making page requests or submitting forms. The metrics are application based and involve counts and measures of frequency or rate. They can be visible metrics like stock purchases, gambling bets, visitors and poll results. They can also be hidden to the user like KPI’s used in marketing and business data. This type of botnet attack can affect an entire application or specific users like posting comments or writing comments to gain recognition.
Alternate Names and Examples
Biasing KPIs
Boosting friends, visitors, and likes
Click fraud
Election fraud
Hit count fraud
Market distortion
Metric and statistic skewing
Page impression fraud
Poll fraud
Poll skewing
Poll/voting subversion
Rating/review skewing
SEO Stock manipulation
Survey skewing
Potential Symptoms:
• An unusual change to a metric or analytic
Ad fraud is the most common and definitely the biggest skewing issue there is. However, there are many forms of skewing.
Types of Skewing attacks:
There are too many to list. Anything that a user could interact with on a website can be skewed. Clicking on links, image links, advertisements, reviews and ratings, like buttons on social networks, check boxes, radio buttons, bidding on auction sites, placing a bet on a gambling site, etc…
Engaging in this type of activity messes with a lot of analytic data that’s crucial for any web business. Businesses rely on analytics for making key business decisions and if this data is all messed up from bot related traffic, those decisions are harder to make. They could even lead to incorrect decisions if those decision makers aren’t aware of their level of bot traffic. Let’s put this into an example…
Take an eCommerce company that sells goods online. As the head of marketing for my company, I need to have a really good understanding of how my customers are spending time on my website. Let’s say there is one particular product that’s getting a lot more views than any other. I might make the decision to place that product all over my homepage to make that product stand out and drive more purchases. However, if a large percentage of those product views were bots clicking on that product page, then that key information I have is incorrect. Maybe I should have placed an entirely different product on the homepage. This could cause my website conversion rates to drop and that’s everything to my business.