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from the at-least-someone-likes-the-advertisers dept.
Here's the Seattle Times with a syndicated NY Times article, http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/russian-cybergang-ring-scored-millions-in-giant-ad-fraud/
Researchers say that a Russian cyber-forgery ring has created more than half a million fake internet users and 250,000 fake websites to trick advertisers into collectively paying as much as $5 million a day for video ads that are never watched.
The fraud, which began in September and is still going on, represents a new level of sophistication among criminals who seek to profit by using bots — computer programs that pretend to be people — to cheat advertisers.
"We think that nothing has approached this operation in terms of profitability," said Michael Tiffany, a founder and the chief executive of White Ops, the ad-focused computer security firm that publicly disclosed the fraud in a report Tuesday. "Our adversaries are bringing whole new levels of innovation to ad fraud."
The thieves impersonated more than 6,100 news and content publishers, stealing advertising revenue that marketers intended to run on those sites, White Ops said. The scheme exploited known flaws in digital advertising, including the lack of a consistent, reliable method for tracking ads and ensuring that they are shown to the promised audience.
The spoofed outlets include a who's who of the web: video-laden sites like Fox News and CBS Sports, large news organizations like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, major content platforms like Facebook and Yahoo and niche sites like Allrecipes.com and AccuWeather. Although the main targets were in the United States, news organizations in other countries were also affected.
$5 mil/day is enough to support a pretty good sized team, I wonder how big the scamming operation is?
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday December 26 2016, @12:46PM
I will stake a bet that the browser/scraper they are using is casperjs (http://casperjs.org/), a javascript platform that sits on top of a headless browser and lets you inject, scrape and manipulate the site to your whim. It is immensely powerful, especially against modern dynamic sites where simple static scrapers (like BeautifulSoup + urllib2) cannot do.
I have used both of the above and after reading about this, I can hazard a guess that stack is how they did it.
Yes, these guys were handling a lot more than the basics, however this was an income stream for them, a business. Also, they probably didn't start out so advanced. Earning 5 million USD a day would have paid for an entire enterprise company, you could have programmers on the payroll banging out all kinds of code.
Also, the AC below me posted this (hi might be connected to the project), looks like someone has already gotten started on the idea (admittedly with a browser extension). First time I heard of it, and no idea if it is any good, but if you're interested you can find it here: https://adnauseam.io/ [adnauseam.io]