Russian Hackers Strike Again! - Steal $Millions Daily from US Ad Agencies
They are real Robin Hood characters - first they expose the corrupt rulers of oppressed America, then they rip off the weasels who shove those annoying ads in your face all day!
Against the background of the ongoing "Russian hackers" fake news propaganda blitz being foisted on the American public by the mainstream media, let's take a look at a story of some real Russian hackers.
Forbes has reported on "Methbot" - a group supposed to be located in Russia which is stealing millions of dollars a day using bots which click on web ads:
Robbing the rich, giving to the poor
A group of Russian criminals are making between $3 million and $5 million every day in a brazen attack on the advertising market, security firm White Ops claimed today. It's the biggest digital ad fraud ever uncovered and perpetrated by faking clicks on video ads, the company said.
The crew, which White Ops dubbed Ad Fraud Komanda or "AFK13", planned their machinations in meticulous detail. First, they created more than 6,000 domains and 250,267 distinct URLs within those that appeared to belong to real big-name publishers, from ESPN to Vogue. But all that could be hosted on the page was a video ad.
With faked domain registrations, they were able to trick algorithms that decided where the most profitable ads would go into buying their fraudulent web space. Those algorithms typically make bids for ad space most suitable for the advertisement's intended audience, with the auction complete in milliseconds. But AFK13 were able to game the system so their space was purchased over big-name brands.
AFK13 then invested heavily in a bot farm, taking up space in data centers so they could fire faked traffic from more than 570,000 bots at those ads, thereby driving revenue thanks to the pay per click system they exploited. As part of what White Ops called the Methbot campaign, those bots "watched" as many as 300 million video ads a day, with an average payout of $13.04 per thousand faked views. And the fraudsters had their bot army replicate the actions of real people, with faked clicks, mouse movements and social network login information.
So if the MSM really want to talk about Russian hacking, here's their story. Alas, they are still too busy covering up Hillary Clinton's epic fail of a campaign and trying to pressure Donald Trump into an antagonistic relationship with Putin -- but all to no avail.
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