Microsoft is linking malicious software analysts with online advertising fraud experts in an effort to disrupt click fraud, a scam where advertisers pay for worthless clicks.
The Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) will work with the online forensics team within Bing Ads, the company's online advertising system formerly known as adCenter,
wrote Nikola Livic, a MMPC software developer.
Large data sets on malware will be correlated with clicks on advertising in order to detect potentially fraudulent behavior, Livic wrote.
"We are taking two relatively disparate domains of expertise and tools, namely malware and online advertising, and creating prevention systems and processes for identifying the entire chain of benefactors of click-fraud malware," Livic wrote. "In this way, we're stopping the flow of illicit money at the adCenter level."