Russian ‘Methbot’ scammers steal $3 to $5 mil a day by exploiting ad networks

A group of Russian cybercriminals is stealing between $3 and $5 million a day by diverting legitimate advertising revenues from over 6,000 brand-name websites such as ESPN, Vogue, Fortune, Fox News and CBS Sports.

The criminals do this by using legitimate data centers to run hundreds of servers pretending to be real people watching hundreds of millions of video ads a day placed on more than a quarter million domains, according to a report released this morning.

This is a very new, and very successful take on traditional click fraud, where the scammers install malware on home computers that watches the ads, and set up dummy websites stuffed with ads to collect the ad revenues.

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