abcnews.go.com posted on
December 20th, 2016, quoting a firm which specializes in detection of online-ad fraud as saying
that a criminal group of Russia is running huge fraud which has been stealing
millions of digital advertising dollars per day for the last few months.
It is estimated that billions
of dollars were lost in a year due to fake traffic, fraudulent clicks, and
various other scams. But there is little motivation to stop it because of the
manner the online-advertising market is structured with many layers of
middlemen and ad-networks.
In fact, the growth of
sophisticated bot-nets and other types of click fraud is one of the reasons why
less than half of all Internet ads are even seen by humans, according to a
research conducted by comScore in 2013, an online analytics firm.
White Ops, a New York-based
firm, has named the operation "Methbot" because of references to meth
hidden in the computer code underlying the scam, and said it is the biggest and
most profitable fraud operation yet to assault digital advertising. The company
said that the scam is believed to originate from Russia using a so-called bot
net to fake views of as many as 300 million video ads per day and trick
advertisers to pay for views which were never seen by humans.
While Methbot had its own
devoted servers running its software, several bot-nets are created out of
ordinary PCs owned by innocent victims, who download "malware" or
malicious programs from the Internet. Software can be installed in the
background by clicking on a link or a popup ad which then captures the computer
for different purposes.
As hacking by Russian
government dominating headlines all over the world, Michael Triffany, CEO of
White Ops, said that this scam is perhaps not being run by the Kremlin although
it has massive size and sophistication.
White Ops said that to fight
the fraud, it will release known IP addresses associated with Methbot to enable
advertisers and their agencies to block them. The company added that it will
release a fake domain name and full URL list to show where this phony activity
has been taking place.
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