- Vector type:
- Data Pollution
- Risk level:
- Low to Moderate
- Impact level:
- Moderate
Paying Indian/Bangladeshi click-farms to “use” your competitor’s website, by making fraudulent transactions, loading and then abandoning shopping carts, randomly clicking through pages and catalogs, etc. can seriously screw with their usage and conversion data, which, in turn, can render their potential for strategic planning almost non-existent.
Similarly, a massive influx of bad-backlinks, while technically being an outdated and ineffective NSEO attack, will render both analytics and Google Search Console data next to useless through data pollution.
Defense
There is no defense against a data pollution attack. What’s more, being attacked in this fashion necessitates a costly cleanup operation as well as the implementation of user behavior filtering, to render the collected data useful again. So while not being directly impactful on a company’s income or ROI, the after effects of this type of Negative Digital Marketing attack can be costly and lasting.