What happens when you click an AdSense ad?
A started to think about this when I did a google search for AdSense revenue-sharing. The first hit is KernelTrap, a discussion forum for linux kernel development. They a have a system where you will be credited 80% of all AdSense revenue for threads you have started, given that you associate your AdSense id with your forum account. And get this, the way this is implemented is simply by changing the AdSense id on 80% of the impressions.
Doesn’t this open up a lot of possibilities for click-fraud? I mean, if money can be directed to a different account from the one originally associated with a site, then there are a lot of possibilities for abusing this, right? Attached to this post is a proof-of-concept greasemonkey script put together in 5 minutes that will change the default id (google_client_id) on any page with AdSense advertisements into one specified in the script. If it actually works (seems too, not sure though as AdSense reports lag behind), this opens up quite a lot of opportunities to the increasing number of enemies google is gathering. Picture some large ISP putting a proxy with similar logic in front of their customers..
Update: Yes, my AdSense statistics show clicks and impressions, yet they have never been published on any site. The script seemed to do its trick.
mysense.user.js - The logic behind the script is described below.
The script is triggered for any page opened from pagead*.googlesyndication.com, and relies on ads being loaded into a separate iframe. It grabs the URL that is being loaded, and re-creates a new one that contains an altered google_adsense_id parameters (named ca-pub-id). Then the script reloads the iframe with the modified URL. As the original URL did not seem to contain any check summing, I believe this should work. I do, however, hope sincerely that google has some kind of server-side checking that renders this script useless. This is a proof-of-concept script, but a custom proxy server could do much more.
April 25th, 2006 at 9:33 am
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