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Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

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Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#31
post #7

>> those bots "watched" as many as 300 million video ads a day, with an average of $13.04 per faked view. Who on earth pays that kind of price to have someone watch their ad video? Serious question.

The article has since been updated, now it mentions $13.04 per 1000 views: >> those bots "watched" as many as 300 million video ads a day, with an average payout of $13.04 per thousand faked views.

> $13.04 per thousand faked views

I thought the usual payout was an order of magnitude lower than that.

Something like 1$ per thousand views

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#32
post #3
post #2

I've long wondered if the best ad blocker would be a client that simply randomly clicks ads instead of blocking them. If you send fake clicks and spoof looking like real activity, that will pressure both advertisers and the websites that display ads. If millions of people do this...

The problem is that while this might work great on a large scale, it breaks down at the individual level: why would I want all that ad-clicking activity associated with my account / cookie / IP?

Once your client "clicks" all the ads suddenly all meta data about you becomes useless. That is much better than simply not showing ads.

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#33
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article has since been updated, now it mentions $13.04 per 1000 views: >> those bots "watched" as many as 300 million video ads a day, with an average payout of $13.04 per thousand faked views.

> $13.04 per thousand faked views I thought the usual payout was an order of magnitude lower than that. Something like 1$ per thousand views

Probably $13.04 is what network takes for 1k views... publishers get scraps

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#34
post #5

So one way this fraud is committed is by consuming the content (youtube videos, spotify plays, etc) and taking in the direct revenue streams. The bigger picture is virality. Nobody wants to watch your video with 100 views. Same video with 10M views, now everyone has to watch it. The music business has been doing this so much for so long that it's to the point where I automatically distrust everything that's "popular"…

This is a decent place to find videos that haven't been gamed: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a brazen attack on privacy, intrusive javascript tracks mouse movement, behaviour etc. and can detect if it's a human that does the clicking or your ad blocker/clicker. Next up might be eye tracking through the webcam, do you want an BS-armsrace with the ad industry or can we just block all that nonsense? If you sell shoes, put up some shoe ads with an affiliate link, shouldn't that work good enough? You'd save mi…

A VM running the an OS, a browser with some software identifying the interesting banners and clicking on the while they move the mouse and scroll the window in human-like ways. Imagine now a beefy box with a couple hundred VMs running on it. Now imagine fake cameras catching a rendered environment and tracking virtual eyes that move according to what the camera would expect. If you want ad networks that rely on camer…

Your imagination, my friend, scares me.

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#36
post #9
post #2

I've long wondered if the best ad blocker would be a client that simply randomly clicks ads instead of blocking them. If you send fake clicks and spoof looking like real activity, that will pressure both advertisers and the websites that display ads. If millions of people do this...

I get a cheap thrill out of clicking ads to make people pay. Trump ad ... click Comcast ... click Ambulance chasing lawyer ... click click click So that would be better than random - a plugin that clicks the ads for things you don't like or aren't interested in.

If you really want to put a dent in things, search for medical issues and click the law firm ads. I've seen clicks costing in the high hundreds.

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#37
post #15

Normally a "real browser" can't run 100s of ad players at once, but "methbrowser" is a node.js application with a C module that speaks Flash's plugin protocol directly. It simulates a dom, runs JavaScript in a node VM, but doesn't have to do any of the messy rendering that things like PhantomJS have to. It was discovered years ago because: * Their IP stack was acting like Linux[1] * Their flash player said "I'm Linux…

Can we have a spamhaus for ad fraud? * list of botnet infected IPs participating in ad fraud * list of offending/incompetent SSP blindly accepting forged requests

> Can we have a spamhaus for ad fraud?

There are a lot of vendors in this space now, offering various kinds of "spamhaus"-type solutions. They're all crap because they operate blacklists of various kinds to keep their customers dependent.

The ideal scenario is for ad networks/SSPs to implement the anti-fraud technology themselves, however getting there from here is difficult: The first ad network to go clean will be at a significant (fiscal) disadvantage.

I'd like to get in touch with anyone ad network/SSP that wants to go first.

> lists of botnet infected IPs participating in ad fraud

This won't be enough.

A popular "audience extender" is to use an iframe containing your site as an ad tag, and run it on your display network. Unless you have been using an ad blocker for the last ten years (and maybe even then), it's very likely your IP address has been used in ad fraud.

> lists of offending/incompetent SSP blindly accepting forged requests

Google facilitates an enormous amount of ad fraud, but media buyers have to buy from Google because nobody else sells Google search ads (except, I suppose, the injection people...)

Yahoo purchased a company who was selling video ads that were muted using uncommon AS3 mixer controls.

I think a much shorter list would be the media suppliers that don't have ad fraud on them and don't facilitate ad fraud. You'll find such a list below.

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#38
Every major ad publisher knows or should know that a large portion of their ad clicks are fraud. I knew this when getting into affiliate networks, it's just cost of being in this business. The actual problem has been around since web advertising's early days it's just that this particular case has been discovered.

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#39
I'm having trouble finding information about what laws cover "click fraud" or "ad fraud". The article mentioned that this was illegal behavior, but never provided any more detail. The closest I've gotten is US Title 18 - 1030, though I'm not sure if the article is even talking about US law. I did stumble across an article from 2014 arguing in favor of making click fraud a federal crime, which cited this advertisement:

http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/click-fraud.ht...

Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views

#40
post #36
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a cheap thrill out of clicking ads to make people pay. Trump ad ... click Comcast ... click Ambulance chasing lawyer ... click click click So that would be better than random - a plugin that clicks the ads for things you don't like or aren't interested in.

If you really want to put a dent in things, search for medical issues and click the law firm ads. I've seen clicks costing in the high hundreds.

For real?

I also think that prices are extremely inflated.

Even stuff which shows like hundred people a day costs you 8 dollar per click. No amount of selling will you get back the money.

Imho something is wrong there...

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