We all know what malware is capable of and that’s why we use a good and reliable antivirus like Avira. But while most of the things malware does sounds horrible and scary there are some that … well, do not.

The perfect example would be click-fraud malware, a kind of malware that does exactly what its name says: It clicks on advertisement. Basically the advertiser has to pay each time a real person or – in the case of malware – a bot-infected device clicks on an ad. A recent report claims that businesses are losing as much as $6.3 billion a year to click-fraud. Crazy, right? But still nothing to lose any sleep over since you are not the one paying the bill.

According to the security researchers from Damballa though, click-fraud can evolve: “Click-fraud malware infections can become something more sinister. In May, Damballa Failsafe tracked and recorded the activity of a click-fraud infection that pulled in three additional click-fraud infections plus CryptoWall, which encrypts the files on the host system to render them inaccessible to the user. Within a couple of a couple hours a simple click-fraud infection escalated to a crippling malware infection. Suddenly, that infected device became a high-risk priority.“

If there is one lesson to be learned from all of this: No malware is too small or “unimportant” to become really dangerous at some point.

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