Category Archives: ad fraud

How scammers made ad fraud a billion-dollar criminal industry

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Whoever came up with “thieves rob banks because that’s where all the money is” needs to add “digital advertising” to the updated version of the adage. Criminals simply don’t need to go through all the trouble of stealing money from well-fortified financial institutions when they can just trick advertisers into directly lining their pockets. With internet ad revenue totaling more than $100 billion in 2018, scammers are following that line of money: ad fraud is set to cost the industry as much as $44 billion annually by 2022. But the problem has ramifications for more than just the digital advertising market. Digital ad revenue provides much of the financial underpinning of e-commerce and online-based businesses. Media agencies suffer when their analytics tools report a substantial amount of web traffic, but the amount of revenue doesn’t support the number of visitors tracked by their systems. Online ad fraud has become so profitable that […]

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No longer clicking: Online ad fraud has fallen in the past year

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Online advertising fraud will cost digital marketers $5.8 billion this year, down from $6.5 billion the year before, according to new research. The forecast arrived in a report published Wednesday by White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers, providing a sliver of hope for ad companies who have lost money by paying for access to humans who don’t actually exist. This year’s decline can be attributed to the adoption of the ads.txt anti-spoofing protocol and incremental advances in more secure video advertising technology. But it’s also clear that ad-fraud rings also are updating their strategies, and looking for new ways to make a buck. “Less fraud means less revenue lost to cybercriminals,” the report states. “And increased implementation of cybersecurity defenses, raising the cost and risk of the crime, has helped to dissuade some would-be fraudsters from pursuing this line of cybercrime altogether.” Ad fraud works in a variety of […]

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Alleged Methbot scammer Zhukov asks judge for new attorney in ad fraud case

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Aleksandr Zhukov is not happy. The accused leader of an advertising fraud scheme that U.S. officials say defrauded international companies out of millions of dollars wrote a letter last week to Judge Edward Korman of the Eastern District of New York asking for assistance in finding new legal representation. Zhukov, in the note submitted Friday, asked the judge to appoint Simone Bertollini, a New York-based attorney, as his public defender. He hopes to hire Bertollini because of the attorney’s representation of Fabio Gasperini, an Italian man convicted in 2017 of operating a botnet of 100,000 hacked computers for malicious purposes. Bertollini would replace Igor Litvak, another New York-based attorney who withdrew from the case in March because of Zhukov’s inability to pay his legal fees. Litvak also appeared to be negotiating with prosecutors seeking a plea deal, though it’s clear now Zhukov intends to go to trial. In his letter to Korman, […]

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Bots 101: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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In our industry, the term bot applies to software applications designed to perform an automated task at a high rate of speed. Typically, I use bots at Radware to aggregate data for intelligence feeds or to automate a repetitive task. I also spend a va… Continue reading Bots 101: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things→

Third suspect in Methbot, 3ve case to plead not guilty after extradition from Malaysia

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A Kazakh national accused of helping coordinate an advertising fraud scheme that fleeced companies out of tens of millions of dollars will plead not guilty when he arrives in the U.S. to stand trial, his lawyer told CyberScoop. Sergey Ovsyannikov is scheduled to be extradited to the U.S. in the coming weeks, a Kazakh consulate official told CyberScoop last week. When Ovsyannikov arrives in court, he will plead not guilty to charges that he led the 3ve botnet-based scheme to falsify billions of advertisements, costing businesses $29 million between December 2015 and October 2018, according to defense attorney Arkady Bukh. “At the arraignment, the plea will be entered as not guilty,” Bukh said. “Then we’ll go over the [evidence] and…we’ll see if the government is in a position to prove any guilt.” His presence in court will mark the third time an accused member of the 3ve/Methbot group was extradited […]

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Alleged Russian Hacker Pleads Not Guilty After Extradition to United States

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A Russian hacker indicted by a United States court for his involvement in online ad fraud schemes that defrauded multiple American companies out of tens of millions of dollars pleaded not guilty on Friday in a courtroom in Brooklyn, New York.

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Accused ‘Methbot’ ringleader extradited to U.S.

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The accused ringleader of “Methbot,” an alleged digital ad fraud scheme, is scheduled to appear in Brooklyn court Friday to be arraigned on charges related to defrauding companies out of tens of millions of dollars. Aleksandr Zhukov, a 38-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. from Bulgaria Thursday, according to a spokesman for the Eastern District of New York. Zhukov is the lead defendant in the case, in which he and four other men are accused of renting more than 1,900 computer servers to simulate humans viewing ads on fabricated web pages. The group developed relationships with ad networks, which paid the Methbot group roughly $7 million in the fraud scheme, prosecutors said in a November indictment. Zhukov worked as the CEO of that group, described in the indictment as “Ad Network #1,” and directed roughly $5.4 million from one account into a corporate account located in New Zealand, prosecutors […]

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Ad Fraud 101: How Cybercriminals Profit from Clicks

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Fraud is and always will be a cornerstone of the cybercrime community. The associated economic gains provide substantial motivation for today’s malicious actors, which is reflected in the rampant use of identity and financial theft, and ad fraud… Continue reading Ad Fraud 101: How Cybercriminals Profit from Clicks→

From DDoS attacks to ad fraud: Smarter bots are copying human behavior

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Major websites and internet services have been caught up in an epidemic of fake traffic, an expensive problem for digital operators that also threatens to undermine trust in legitimate areas of the web. Innovative scammers located throughout the world are constantly developing new ways to falsify web traffic, directing unwitting users’ internet connections to ads that may or may not actually exist. In these ad fraud campaigns, thieves traditionally would use automated bots to artificially inflate website traffic in schemes that allowed website operators to profit from higher advertising revenue. Security teams could once easily detect bot traffic by identifying visitors engaged in anomalous behavior, such as opening and closing windows millions of times. Now, ad-fraud scammers are using more advanced technology that more closely resembles actual human activity, making it far more difficult for digital crime-fighters to stop it. Gone are the days when scammers simply would only use […]

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