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

I often see the argument that we should "get rid of most ads on the web in general", but have yet to see a reasonable proposal for what replaces that in a way that works for companies wanting to reach consumers with their products.

To play devil's advocate, it would be a huge loss to society if advertisements were no longer viable due to constant fraud.

Information would flow a lot less freely because then content providers would be forced to switch to directly charging for their content rather than giving it to you for "free + ads" as they do currently. It wouldn't just be "low value" content dropping off, "low value" is another individual value judgement.

It would become much harder to connect products and services or become harder to separate actual stories from long-form product placement.

I don't find much wrong with the concept of "advertising". I do take issue with certain types of "bad" or malicious ads, but I'm also generally not receptive to most advertising.

However, ads exist because they are effective at connecting users with products.

>What are you referring to with the "whitehat stuff" to get in the 100k+ (/day) club?

Bot detection, ad auditing, antifraud systems

When ads are sold programatically (at least at the exchange level), they're almost always done on an impression basis, not a click basis. So by the time you see the ad, most of the financial exchange has already taken place. Some DSPs, like Criteo, charge their clients on a CPC basis, so you're affecting their downstream clients but not Criteo itself.

Depending on the exchange, you can sometimes see how much the DSP/client paid for the impression by looking at the win notification URL. Typically there will be a URL query parameter that has been filled in by the exchange, like `BID_CPM=4.00`, and when your browser requests this URL (which is owned by the DSP/client), your browser is effectively notifying the winner of the auction that they won and how much it cost. However, ad exchanges are increasingly sending these fields encrypted to protect against manipulation/fraud.

If you really want to manipulate the amount of money that advertisers pay to show you ads, look at what ad botnets like the one in this article do. The PDF above only briefly mentions it, but one of the things they do to increase their perceived value to DSPs and clients is they make their browsers visit high value advertisers websites (e.g. they might visit a shopping website and put items in their cart to make it look like they were strongly considering purchasing the items). Later, when you visit a publisher site, this will cause the bidders' machine learning systems to predict a much higher value for you than they otherwise would have, and submit higher bids as a result.

There is some talk of prosecution of these hackers. Does anyone else disagree with that??

Personally, I feel that a publisher of technology is responsible for ensuring there are no "holes". If someone finds a hole and pokes around and uses it for any reason, it should not be criminal.

If I found a way to methodically purchase all the pieces to win McDonald's monopoly game, would that be criminal fraud? Or would it be negligence by McDonald's? My view is the latter.

> Personally, I feel that a publisher of technology is responsible for ensuring there are no "holes".

Isn't this the definition of victim blaming?