Statistics Hacking - Exploiting Vulnerabilities in News Websites

We analyze and discuss a vulnerability in leading news websites, that can lead to modification of the system statistics by malicious users (statistics hacking). We outline two broad categories of methods that can counter statistics hacking. The first category consists of many methods already available to distinguish human users from computers. We compare the different methods within this category on basis of security and accessibility. The second category uses well known clustering techniques applied to the web statistics. We compare the different methods within this category on basis of security.