I've noticed that in the last several days that some of the sites that my company has started running adsense on have been targetted by some strange bots that show up as DataCha0s 2.0 in the list of bots that have visted the sites. We had discovered that there were several invalid clicks on these sites earlier (I mentioned this in a previous thread) and started implementing some click protection as well as going through the server logs. The dates that these things have visited our sites, seems to correlate with the activity that has shown up in adsense as invalid clicks. My research shows that this bot is a known hacking bot used to search for exploits in scripts. Anyone have any experience with protecting your sites from such a thing??
There have been no exploits found that I know of ... all scripts on the sites are up-to-date. There's been nothing injected into the database either, the only thing out of the ordinary are the invalid clicks. I've also noticed that there is alot of traffic from several proxies as well ...
Seems that this bot has gone away and since having the proxies blocked at the firewall, our server loads have dropped considerably. I'm still suspecting something funny ... it was across 5 of our servers and I suspect that there's some zero-day vulnerability in something that either we are running or one of our hosted clients is running. Can't find anything to point this to the invalid clicks we've been receiving, so it may just be a coincidence.