The biggest advertising fraud ever!
A group of hackers is making between $3 Million to $5 Million per day from United States brands and media companies in the biggest digital ad fraud ever discovered.
Online fraud-prevention firm White Ops uncovered this new Ad fraud campaign, dubbed “Methbot,” that automatically generates more than 300 Million fraudulent video ad impressions every day.
The
DDoS has become a game now that could knock any service offline.
A Turkish hacking group is encouraging individuals to join its DDoS-for-Points platform that features points and prizes for carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a list of predetermined targets.
The points earned can later be redeemed for various online click-fraud and hacking tools.
Dubbed Sath-ı
Newest CryptoWall variant enters systems through a click fraud botnet.
Earlier this year, we told you about the return of CryptoWall, malware that encrypts certain files in your computer and, once activated, demands a fine around $500 as a ransom to provide the decryption key. These kinds of financial fraud schemes target both individuals and businesses, are usually very successful and have a significant impact on victims. The problem begins when the victim clicks on an infected advertisement, email, or attachment, or visits an infected website.
Recently, a click fraud botnet with ties to CryptoWall has been discovered. The malware, nicknamed ‘RuthlessTreeMafia‘, has been being used to distribute CryptoWall ransomware. What first appears as an attempt to redirect user traffic to a search engine quickly mutates into an alarming threat as infected systems begin to download CryptoWall and system files and data become encrypted, rendering them useless by their owners. Click fraud and ransomware are two types of crimeware that are usually quite different from one another and typically don’t have many opportunities to join forces; therefore, the result of this unlikely yet powerful collaboration can be detrimental to its victims.
In a public service announcement issued on June 23, the FBI warns of the continued spread of this variant of CryptoWall that has the potential to affect not only individuals, but also government entities and businesses. The report reads:
“Many victims incur additional costs associated with network mitigation, network countermeasures, loss of productivity, legal fees, IT services, and/or the purchase of credit monitoring services for employees or customers. Between April 2014 and June 2015, the IC3 received 992 CryptoWall-related complaints, with victims reporting losses totaling over $18 million.”
The uncovering of this most recent CryptoWall variant also goes to show just how creative cybercriminals can be when coming up with ways to get their malware onto people’s systems. A simple click fraud botnet compromise can now lead to a potentially serious ransom attack.
How to stay safe against infection
We all know what malware is capable of and that’s why we use a good and reliable antivirus like Avira. But while most of the things malware does sounds horrible and scary there are some that … well, do not.
The perfect example would be click-fraud malware, a kind of malware that does exactly what its name says: It clicks on advertisement. Basically the advertiser has to pay each time a real person or – in the case of malware – a bot-infected device clicks on an ad. A recent report claims that businesses are losing as much as $6.3 billion a year to click-fraud. Crazy, right? But still nothing to lose any sleep over since you are not the one paying the bill.
According to the security researchers from Damballa though, click-fraud can evolve: “Click-fraud malware infections can become something more sinister. In May, Damballa Failsafe tracked and recorded the activity of a click-fraud infection that pulled in three additional click-fraud infections plus CryptoWall, which encrypts the files on the host system to render them inaccessible to the user. Within a couple of a couple hours a simple click-fraud infection escalated to a crippling malware infection. Suddenly, that infected device became a high-risk priority.“
If there is one lesson to be learned from all of this: No malware is too small or “unimportant” to become really dangerous at some point.
The post Click-fraud evolved, and it has a plan appeared first on Avira Blog.
Criminals have found a safe haven abusing legitimate processes, such as real-time bidding, implemented by online advertising networks to move exploits and malware, and build botnets and fraud campaigns.
