A sophisticated scam involving 34,000 domains reaped up to $500,000 dollars in advertiser’s traffic, a day!
Bot traffic driven by cybercriminals created more than a million URLs, in an attempt to fool advertisers into buying ad traffic that supposedly originated from big publishers.
This technique is called “domain spoofing,” and the bot traffic was then piped into video ads, generating revenue for the fraudsters.
Danish advertising software firm, Adform, identified the criminal scheme and named it HyphBot.
The HyphBot scam is estimated to have used a network of half a million hijacked IPs mostly in the US, to emulate real browsing behavior. The ad scam is estimated to have been active since at least August.
Last year, another similar scam called MethBot, generated as much as $5,000,000 dollars a day for its operators.
For more information on the HyphBot ad scam, click here.
