Had an unexpected rise in user stats recently?

I have just read this article regarding spikes in stats that are uncharacteristic of general trends.

AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic | The Register

Early last month, webmasters here at The Reg noticed an unexpected spike in our site traffic. Suddenly, we had far more readers than ever before, and they were reading at a record clip. Visits actually doubled on certain landing pages, and more than a few ho-hum stories attracted an audience worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winner. Or so it seemed.

Interesting. AVG wants to look like a user click, otherwise, the sites designed to include malware can detect them and serve up a "disinfected" version of the page.

This is not going to impact the stats within *search* traffic/referrers, unless they start pretending they were sent from search engine results pages which would more likely than not get them sued by a # of parties.