The FBI, Google and 20 technology organizations have teamed up to launch a giant network (3ve) in cyberspace that was used by criminals to create false views 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 concerted intervention to remove network botnets, the US Department of Justice has also announced an indictment against eight suspects believed to be behind the project. Three of them have already been arrested and expected to be released in the United States.
According to a DOJ indictment and a white paper released by Google and Cyber-Security White Ops, the eight suspects are believed to be the primary administrators of the particular fraud system that is believed to work at least from 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.
The researchers report that a gang managed to spread the bot to more than 700.000 computers, infecting them with malware Kovter. 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, η Google αποκάλυψε σήμερα ότι γνώριζε από πέρυσι τις δυνατότητες και τις functions του bot. Η Google ανέφερε ότι συνέθεσε σε μια ομάδα 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, και 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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