Hyphbot is a bot network that generated more than $500,000 dollars a day, by forwarding traffic to its money-making videos.
The network faked the originating source of traffic, making advertisers believe they were buying traffic from legitimate resources on major networks.
Traffic fraud costs billions of dollars to advertisers every year, and HyphBot is one of the biggest botnets to ever hit digital advertising.
Adform, the Danish marketing analytics and software development company that identified and christened HyphBot, has published a white paper about its discovery.
“HyphBot, which was identified using our in-house algorithms and expert analytics, appears to be one of the largest bot networks to be discovered in Digital Advertising. Significantly, it has also included a large amount of premium inventory. It was also active through at least 14 different exchanges and SSPs. Within each SSP, multiple networks were infected. HyphBot was generating up to 1.5 billion requests per day and it generated fake traffic on more than 34,000 different domains, including premium publishers, and more than a million different URLs. Our analysis suggests that infected devices – a network of bots – accessing the Internet from more than half a million IP addresses (mostly from the US) are responsible for this wave of non-human traffic. Most notable, the problem is not in the long tail, it is affecting premium publishers.”
For the full details, read the white paper, titled “How Adform discovered HyphBot.”
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