16 | NewScientist | 20 April 2019NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
PLASTICS are leaving no corner of
the planet untouched. Microplastics,
which measure less than 5 millimetres
in length, have been found in a
mountain glacier for the first time.
Roberto Sergio Azzoni at the
University of Milan in Italy and his
colleagues found 300 particles of
microplastic in 4 kilograms of
sediment from the Forni glacier in the
Italian Alps. If this is representative,
there could be 162 million pieces of
plastic across the whole glacier.
Most of the microplastics found
were fibres, with 40 per cent coming
from polyesters. This suggests that
much of the plastic is coming from
clothes worn by hikers and
mountaineers visiting the glacier.
The researchers wore cotton clothes
coupled with wooden clogs when
taking samples so as not to skew the
results with plastics from their own
clothes. “That is not so comfortable,”
says Sergio Azzoni, who presented
the findings at the European
Geosciences Union conference
in Vienna, Austria, last week.
The presence of microplastics on
the glacier isn’t an obvious immediate
health threat to people, as melting
water from the ice is used for
hydropower and not directly for
farming. However, the plastic is likely
to be dispersed by water into plains
lower down – or perhaps even by air
(see page 18). Adam Vaughan ■Alpine glaciers
littered with
microplastics
Donna LuIN THE attention economy of
the internet, clicks are a hot
commodity, used to drive
engagement in the form of likes
and viewer numbers. Now hackers
are also tricking unsuspecting
people into clicking on links to
boost their profits.
Wei Meng at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong and his
colleagues found that third-party
programs are secretly changing
hyperlinks and inserting URLs
in seemingly ordinary websites,
leading to click-driven profit and
malware that could put users’
computers at risk.
The scam is based on pay-per-
click advertising, which involves
an advertiser paying a website to
display an ad, with the payment
varying according to the number
of website visitors who click on it.
The price an advertiser pays
for each click depends on factors
like the popularity of a target
audience. A single click can be
worth anything from a few
pennies to more than a pound.
Fraudulent clicks can be madeby bots or click farms, where
hundreds of smartphones or
computers are directed to watch
videos or click certain links. But
many advertising companies can
detect clicks made by machines.
So people have come up with
tricks to get others to click. For
example, an apparent link to
a news story on a website may
actually take someone to anadvertising site, earning ad
money for the initial site’s owner.
Other tricks include invisible
objects that cover part of a page
that register as ad clicks when
clicked, and hyperlinks that open
an ad first before redirecting to
the intended website.
The team searched the internet’s
250,000 most popular websites
and found 613 containing this so-
called clickjacking code. Though
this was less than 1 per cent of the
websites the researchers looked
at, it amounted to a total dailytraffic of 43 million visits. More
than 3000 hyperlinks had been
secretly inserted on these pages.
One-third of these hyperlinks
were related to advertising. Other
inserted URLs led to pages with
malicious programs or fake anti-
virus software.
In some cases, the code
was inserted by the websites
themselves. This suggests a
financial motive as the website
owner would earn commission
from advertisers through their
click numbers.
In other examples, third parties
had secretly inserted the codes
and there was no way of knowing
whether the website owner was
aware of the problem, says Meng,
who will present the work at the
USENIX Security Symposium in
California in August.
“It’s a design problem that is
very difficult to fix,” says Yanick
Fratantonio at French research
centre Eurecom.
Although it is almost
impossible for people to detect,
click manipulation isn’t a cause
for major alarm yet, says
Fratantonio. A similar issue
is emerging on phones, where
dodgy apps drive fake clicks to
ads, making money for the app
developer, he says. ■Hacker tricks to
profit from clicks
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Hundreds of websites contain
code designed to steal clicks“The ‘clickjacking code’ was
inserted by the websites
themselves, suggesting
a financial motive”ROBE
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