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Russian Hackers Stole $5 Million Per Day From Advertisers With Bots and Fake Websites (cnn.com)
Russian hackers have used fake websites and bots to steal millions of dollars from advertisers. According to researchers, the fraud has siphoned more than $180 million from the online ad industry. CNNMoney reports: Dubbed "Methbot," it is a new twist in an increasingly complex world of online crime, according to White Ops, the cybersecurity firm that discovered the operation. Methbot, so nicknamed because the fake browser refers to itself as the "methbrowser," operates as a sham intermediary advertising ring: Companies would pay millions to run expensive video ads. Then they would deliver those ads to what appeared to be major websites. In reality, criminals had created more than 250,000 counterfeit web pages no real person was visiting. White Ops first spotted the criminal operation in October, and it is making up to $5 million per day -- by generating up to 300 million fake "video impressions" daily. According to White Ops, criminals acquired massive blocks of IP addresses -- 500,000 of them -- from two of the world's five major internet registries. Then they configured them so that they appeared to be located all over the United States. They built custom software so that computers (at those legitimate data centers) acted like real people viewing those ads. These "people" even appeared to have Facebook accounts (they didn't), so that premium ads were served. Hackers fooled ad fraud blockers because they figured out how to build software that mimicked a real person who only surfed during the daytime -- using the Google Chrome web browser on a Macbook laptop.
If they are identified, I think they should be fined $1 and then be given a medal.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I run a couple FB community groups that are quite specific. They aren't of interest to anyone outside the community. Fairly regularly I will get requests to join the group from obviously fake accounts. Many have the wrong gender for their name or profile picture. They will have a small random assortment of friends from vastly different nationalities. They will belong to multiple groups in multiple languages. Most of them I report to FB are immediately classified by them as fake accounts and are deleted.
Anyway, I wondered what the point was of these fake accounts. I thought maybe they harvested information (by joining groups they could see who is in the groups and thus attempt to build a graph connecting users). However, now I believe these accounts are created to consume advertising in scams such as this one, and at least some attempt is made to make the accounts appear genuine by having an array of friends and belonging to groups, etc.
Better known as 318230.
The advertisers aren't the ones paying for this service that the "Russian hackers" are providing. The site owners who host the ad campaigns are paying the hackers to inflate their traffic stats in order to defraud the advertising networks.
Granted, I have trouble feeling sorry for the advertisers here too, but these figures are also being used for public traffic stats, which then in turn drives investment and stock prices of internet startup businesses, eventually leading to massive derailment of one of the basic fundamental assumptions upon which the US market thrives. This is a much bigger problem than just the 5 million dollars.