It was released on Thursday, December 5^th that after months of investigation by a group at Microsoft Corp, that what is said to be a major Web ad-fraud machine has been shut down.

It took help from oversea law enforcement and a court order to cut off the servers that were the driving force behind what has been named ZeroAccess, a malware that has infected computers all over the world. Although the group of investigators were not able to identify who was running the European-Based servers, they were able to knock out the connections and are working to investigate the owner’s identity.

The quest to solve the botnet issue has been ongoing for years. In an article from last year written by Devin Coldewey of NBC News, it was stated that Facebook had revealed that 83 million fake users had profiles on Facebook and many were bots. In a study performed by Solve Media, it was indicated that one of our 10 website hits on any website is a bot or an automated script. Although back in 2012, it does not seem as if the internet has cleaned up too much since then.

According to eMarketer, digital ad spend this year in the US is expected to reach a height of 42.3 billion dollars. With this team of investigators, led by Microsoft, there is hope to put that 42.3 billion into the right place and put a stop to fraudulent traffic on the web.

Here at FilmAnnex, we are ecstatic about this news and we look forward to a cleaner and safer future for our community of 300,000+ users. We have the BuzzScore in place to reward genuine users who produce quality content and social media interactions and to avoid fraudulent traffic.

 

More information About the shut down of Zero Access can be found here.

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