Click Fraud
CONCEPT
PERFORMANCE ADVERTISING
Invalid clicks from bots, click farms, competitors or publishers inflate pay-per-click costs and distort campaign data; platforms filter and refund some.
CONCEPT
CYBERSECURITY
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
An attack that floods a website, service or network with traffic from many compromised sources to make it slow or unavailable.
BUSINESS RELEVANCE
Even short outages from a DDoS attack interrupt sales, lead capture and customer access, and attacks are sometimes used for extortion or as a distraction, so availability protection belongs in hosting and vendor decisions.
IMPLEMENTATION EXAMPLE
An e-commerce site moves DNS to a CDN with always-on DDoS mitigation, hides its origin IP, accepts origin traffic only from the CDN's IP ranges, and challenges clients that exceed 100 checkout requests per minute.
LIMITATIONS
Mitigation switched on only after an attack starts can leave minutes of downtime. Separating attack traffic from real spikes, such as a campaign launch, is difficult, and on-premises defenses cannot absorb volumes larger than upstream bandwidth.
TECHNICAL EXPLANATION
Attackers direct botnets of infected computers and IoT devices at a target. Volumetric attacks saturate bandwidth, often through amplification; protocol attacks exhaust server, firewall or load balancer resources at layers 3 and 4; and application-layer attacks send costly HTTP requests. Defenses include anycast distribution across a Content Delivery Network (CDN), rate limiting, Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules and blackhole routing, supported by a tested response plan.
Secondary Topics
Systems Architecture
Sources
Cloudflare — What is a DDoS attack? — https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/what-is-a-ddos-attack/; NCSC — Denial of Service (DoS) guidance — https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/denial-service-dos-guidance-collection
Related terms
Middleware
CONCEPT
SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE
Software layers facilitating communication, data management, and messaging protocols between disparate enterprise applications.
AI Orchestration
CONCEPT
INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION
The coordinated management of models, agents, data workflows, business rules, and human oversight to execute automated processes.
Landing Page
CONCEPT
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
What a landing page is, how lead generation and click-through pages differ, and how page relevance affects ad landing page experience and conversion.
Data Layer
CONCEPT
DATA ENGINEERING
How a website data layer exposes structured page, product and event information so tag managers can fire tags without scraping the page.