Click Bomb

We need to do some research and find the reason why we are click bombed. Here is my research after analyzing logs of last 30 days.
Symptoms
1. Click bombers attack home page of wordpress blogs. My VB forum and other internal pages ads are not attacked.
2. I got attacked from US, Germany, South Africa and Thailand. German click bombing stopped after banning two German IPs. But US keeps on even after banning 5 different US IPs.
3. These are real bots which are not detected by statcounter or plugins to detect clicks on ads. Statcounter reports zero visits from US on my sites.
4. Click bombers uses Opera or Google proxy IPs. I checked all other IPs and banned them.
5. Attack started in mid March and still in progress.
Is the above finds match in your cases also? Please reply.

Cause
1. Click bombers are exploiting some wordpess vulnerabilities.

Solution
So the only solution I found working is
1. Remove ads from your homepage and see if you get click bombed again.

 

So cant you share the ips, which you have banned, so other people may also ban them.

 

I already shred those IPs in my previous posts.
46.4.112.87
176.9.79.83
Ban these German IPs to stop click bombing from Germany.

 

I noticed another thing. Did you guys had your content shared on Reddit and sites like this? I see strong relation with click bombing and increased traffic from Materialicius and Reddit.

 

My site is a forum and is Invision (IPB) software.

 

No. I get only traffic from Google and Bing.

 

Here is my report of attack

Website Type: Wordpress blog
Ads getting bombed: Homepage ads
First Attack: March 13 – Germany, March 17- US
Countries: US and Germany
Platform used for attack: Desktop, Tablet, High-end mobile.

The click bomber is using all platforms for attack.

 

Is this happening to all Adsense users or just select ones?

 

That is absolutely correct.

 

Click bombing is a very dirty process people on the internet utilize to destroy other peoples web sites income from adsense. It consists basically in clicking constantly on the ads on the opponents web site. Not just one or two times; hundreds of times. Google will quickly react and close down the account that receives such clicks or at least lock it. Mission accomplished, one more opponent out of the race. Scary, isn’t it?

 

People are so selfish today . Google should review those sites which are click bombed before banning them. It's really painful getting banned for such mishaps.

 

Yes, Click bombing is a nasty,and very dirty method. google should do something about this..​

 

To all of us. But looks like those who have small traffic and income have bigger chance of getting kicked out.


I bet adsense premium users don't have to worry at all about all this.

My advice to all of you is, if you have more than 1,000 unique visitors every day, start looking for direct advertising with companies, without google. You won't have to give 40% or so to google and no one can kick you out. Don't let yourself go in position where you have thousands of $ every month earned with fear of losing them.

 

Well Said, but it's difficult to get direct advertising unless you don't have high quality website.

 

Exactly. But that is our primary goal anyway, right? What's the point of having a bad website.

 

I've just read whatever it is is only targeting Asian bloggers/webmasters, is that the case with everyone here?

 

No it's not the case at all. It's widespread.

 

I'm unsure wither it's happening to me, my CTR is up since 1st April but not to the levels I've read here. I've went from 0.27% in March to 0.39% this month. I do get 20,000 page views a day and most of my clicks are from the US normally so hard to tell. Anybody advise?

 

I never understand people who flag their own accounts to google as potential problems (Hey, look at me, I am being click-bombed) and then wonder why they get banned.

The last thing I would every do would be to report my own account. There is simply no reason to do it, Google already has all the information you are telling them. Except now, you are adding your 2 cents that the clicks you bring them are questionable and they should take a hard look at your account and consider banning you for the good of the network. Looks like you got just what you asked for when you reported yourself for being click bombed.

 

You are ok.