Tshireletso Motlogelwa
14 September 2007
Gaborone — Botswana is home to a number of major cyber-criminals, it has been revealed.
Botswana has been named among countries where a number of cyber criminals involved in a billion Pula fraud are based. The worldwide fraud, known as Click Fraud, is said to total as much as 15 percent of the value of advertising revenue earned by the online giants Yahoo.com and Google.com, and other search engines, or P6 billion every year.
A recent report showed that although the majority of these criminals are based in India and China, Botswana is also listed among countries with a sizable number. Other countries implicated are Egypt, Syria and South Korea.
It is a complex scheme that takes advantage of a loophole within the system of online advertising on the World Wide Web. The usual process is that an advertiser puts an advert with a search engine such as Yahoo or Google. The search-engine carries the advert on its site. However the search engines also recycle the adverts to millions of other websites from known ones such as time.com to smaller obscure ones.
Everytime there is a click, on the advert, presumably by a potential client, whether carried in the main search-engine website or on the small website to which the advert has been 'syndicated' the advertiser pays. An advertiser can pay millions of Pula to the search engine with more paid per click. The search engine spreads the profits among the websites to which it has 'syndicated' the advert in a trickle-down system. Cyber-criminals have found a way to beat this system by 'faking' clicks on their websites.
A cyber-criminal would build a website, get adverts from the search-engine, and use a software that fakes clicks on the adverts, known as ClickBot. This inflates the numbers as if there are many people clicking on the advert, and as a result the advertiser is charged.
"Automated clickbot software or Web server scripts, are popular among scammers because it disguises the user's (ID details) and can program clicks minutes apart to disguise intent" writes Frank Fortunato, a contributor in the Technology online magazine E-commerce-guide.com.
Click Fraud has become the catchword in the IT sector across the western world and the United States government has launched an investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has assembled a team to work on the scheme. Information Technology security specialist Kabelo Chigwedere argues that Botswana has the potential to be a hotbed for such criminals because of its relative laxity when it comes to IT security, lack of legislative apparatus to handle such crimes and a deficit in capacity among law enforcement agencies.
"In Botswana it is easy to commit such crimes because we have not really woken up to the dangers posed by the use of IT technology even as it provides such benefits. Also many users of IT have not given attention to the issues of security," explains Chigwedere.
Botswana Police PR officer Christopher Mbulawa argues that law enforcement is constrained by many factors. "We do not have capacity when it comes to cyber-crime. Furthermore you find that because of limited resources we have to prioritise. Right now cyber-crime is not top of our priorities, not to say we are not handling such issues. It just means you dedicate less of your resources to it than say rape, murder or robbery which are much more prevalent" explains Mbulawa.
However he says the police service works with Interpol on matters of cross-border crime. "Where something may be going on that we do not yet know of, Interpol are our eyes internationally. They contact us in cases where criminals are involved in international schemes" he adds.
Chigwedere says it is a matter of time before the real cost of cyber-crime affects us. "It is a matter of value. You may not see someone bleeding, but cyber-crime bleeds the economy. It has the potential to destroy a country's economy and its standing on the international stage," he adds.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2007 Mmegi/The Reporter. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
