Wondering if a side effect is producing the hordes of "zombies" often reported....

Good point tangor.

IMO the zombies are bots faking human UAs, always has been. A huge percentage of any site's traffic is bots pretending to be human visitors.

Trouble is, very few site owners know how to tell bots from humans. They rely on some type of report software that fails to detect this.

As that article shows, it's fairly easy to fool the people.

More interesting than the article itself is the infographic linked in the article that explains how this works.
[protected.media...]

I doubt that this has anything to do with Zombies. Zombie traffic is unsolicited, unwanted by the website owner. The scam here is described as the owners of the offending sites are buying the traffic from torrent and adult sites, specifically to spoof the detection system so that ads can be clicked by bots without detection. This is sort of an ad arbitrage on steroids.

It always amazes me how creative people can be to cheat others. This method is evil genius. Ad buyers beware of bots! Thanks for the links.

It always amazes me how creative people can be to cheat others. This method is evil genius. Ad buyers beware of bots! Thanks for the links.

Can you imagine the web if those of "evil genius" did good? I am also confused as how much effort is expended to do bad.... then again, stealing, for some, is a matter of honor. "Never worked a day in my life. Let the other sap do the work and I'll siphon off the profits." or "See how clever I am? Heh, Heh, heh."

For those actors: [youtube.com...]

Detection of these systems has to be improved or more advertisers will drop out.

>Can you imagine the web if those of "evil genius" did good?

Often, tangor.