The FBI, Google and 20 tech organizations teamed up to bring down a giant (3ve) cybernetic used by criminals to creation fake impressions and clicks.
For those who do not know what fake clikcs means, it's a method used to trick advertising networks. The above network has been operating for the last four years and has earned millions of dollars in revenue for its creators.
In addition to a coordinated intervention to remove botnets of the network, the American Ministry Justice also announced an indictment against eight suspects believed to be behind the project. Three of them have already been arrested and are expected to be extradited to the US.
According to a DOJ indictment and a white paper released by Google and Cyber-Security firm White Ops, the eight suspects are believed to be the primary operators of the specific fraud scheme believed to have been operating since at least 2014.
Researchers and the FBI said the administrators used different programs to create ad views and clicks. They used tricks such as hiring other botnets and creating their own botnets hosted on different data centers to hide their true IP addresses. They even created legitimate pages for displaying ads as well as for controlling bots.
According to the FBI, in one of these tricks they used more than 1.900 servers to host MethBot / Miuref / Boaxxe bots.
The bots were configured to mimic the traffic coming from both desktops and mobile devices.
Researchers report that the gang managed to spread the bot to more than 700.000 computers, infecting them with the Kovter malware. The bot was secretly opening browser windows to load websites which of course brought the criminals more profits.
In one publishing on the blog of the company, Google revealed today that it was aware of the bot's capabilities and functions since last year. Google reported that it composed in one team εργασίας που απαρτίζουν μεγάλα τεχνολογικά ονόματα: Microsoft, ESET, Symantec, Proofpoint, Trend Micro, F-Secure, Malwarebytes, CenturyLink, MediaMath, White Ops, Amazon, Adobe, Trade Desk, Oath, The Shadowserver Foundation, and the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance.
The names of 8 arrested: Aleksandr Zhukov (38, Russia), Boris Timokhin (39 from Russia), Mikhail Andreev (34 from Russia), Denis Avdeev (40 from Russia), Dmitry Novikov (?? Sergey Ovsyannikov (30 from Kazakhstan), Aleksandr Isaev (31 from Russia), and Yevgeniy Timchenko (30 years from Kazakhstan).
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