Methbot: a $3M-$5M/day video ad-tech fraud

[dlevere]

White Ops, a security firm, has published a detailed report on a crime-ring they call "Methbot" that generated $3M-$5M by creating 6,000 fake websites to embed videos in, then generating convincing bots that that appeared to watch 300,000,000 videos/day - running virtual instances of various browsers (mostly Chrome) on virtual machines running MacOS X, from a huge pool of IP addresses that they fraudulently had assigned to US locations, deploying clever grace notes like limiting access to "daylight" hours in their notional locations; simulating mouse-movements and clicks and more.

http://boingboing.net/2016/12/21/met...y-video-a.html

http://www.whiteops.com/methbot

http://go.whiteops.com/rs/179-SQE-82...eration_WP.pdf