Viruses and spam could provoke an Internet collapse within two years, according to a Finnish security researcher who says the problem isn't merely a matter of technology. And a major newspaper report suggests click fraud, a new scourge for online advertisers, could hasten that collapse.
"There are many bad people who want to create chaos on purpose," Helsinki University of Technology professor Hannu H. Kari told the Finnish news agency STT, and he said that the longer the bugs and spam continue the more likely that the loosely-organized Internet as we now know it will operate less smoothly and become more prone to manipulation if not destruction.
Kari also said that the metastasizing spam volume stands to make the Internet less and less credible as a legitimate information source. "Currently," he said, "there are no guarantees that a named sender is the real sender of an email."
And with security holes now exploitable by more than just hard computer nerds, the more skilled Netizen can take over thousands of computers and use them for anything from launching attacks to scrambling information sources.
Kari called for more proactive measures like infrastructure and software improvements, and also user identification improvements.
The problem is that for every technological advance there comes a near-concurrent advance in using it to make mischief. For email there was spam; for the World Wide Web there is spyware and adware; and even for the toddler known as Internet telephony there is already SPIT (spam over Internet telephony). And you can add click fraud to those scourges, according to the New York Times.
Click fraud involves merchants paying fees to sites playing host to their ads whenever visitors click the ads, with the fraud coming when the clicks come not from prospective customers but scam artists, automated scripts, and even their own competitors.
"It's really any click initiated on a cost-per-click ad that is made without there being a possibility of a legitimate site-visit or a transaction to occur," said Alchemist Media president Jessie C. Stricchiola to the Times. "It's a really serious problem for the advertisers it affects." Stricchiola's company, in fact, helps advertisers recoup revenues waylaid by click fraud, which can cost advertisers millions in spending on consumers who don't even exist.
