Posted on 12/20/2016 2:56:06 PM PST by Theo
In a twist on the peddling of fake news to real people, researchers say that a Russian cyberforgery 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 co-founder and the chief executive of White Ops, the ad-focused computer security firm that publicly disclosed the fraud in a report on Tuesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hacking and identity theft have been major problems for years. If Obama really gave a damn, why didn’t he make this a huge priority eight years ago? Or seven? Or six? Or five? Or four? Or three? Or two? Or one? For that matter, why didn’t the Republicans?
Got an email from Vladimir Putin yesterday:
He asked me to open a bank account for him.
Actually, I made an effort to click on Hillary ads to force her costs to go up.
Minor correction to your post.
It was Ukrainians, not Russians.
Oh, and it's not like the NYT didn't notice it, they lied about it and then won some award for the lie.
Double Dubious source.
The plan is to take anything coming from the NYTs as fake news.
i guess we see how obama is spending the scant few days left he has in the white house.
It must be exciting to have all the liberal dems turn into Russia-hating war mongers so they can be on your side...
Fraud is such a strong word how about “clicks with less intent” direct quote from a meeting with Valueclick’s (now conversant) CTO .
Facebook basically did the same thing.
It’s not BS. I am involved in online publishing, and this is directly affecting my business.
The server-hacking story is completely unrelated to this ad-bot story. Completely unrelated, different people entirely.
Smart!
Some of the website editors I work with ask me to remove pro-Hillary ads, but when I tell them that they can take money out of Hillary’s pockets, they sometimes let me leave the ads ...
NYT might be dubious. But the source of their info is http://www.whiteops.com/methbot — and I can personally vouch for the legitimacy on that page. Some of the websites I work with, that have been affected by this unprecedented ad-bot-attack, are listed in their findings.
Funny how that works, doesn’t it? Back in the Reagan era, you could’ve been mistaken for Ted Kennedy (but even he wasn’t so stupid to make the argument you’re making).
It may be unrelated, but it’s a replacement. It’s the new attack de jour on the Russians.
The hacking is old, the bot-ting is new.
When the bot news gets old, worn out... the left will find something new.
The thing is, the “Russian Hacking” story is fake news.
This ad-bot issue is real, and directly affecting a lot of people involved in online publishing and advertising.
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