Massive Bot-Enabled Ad Fraud Campaign Targeted Connected TVs

[upnorth]

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https://www.darkreading.com/risk/massive-bot-enabled-ad-fraud-campaign-targeted-connected-tvs/d/d-id/1337584

ICEBUCKET operation is the largest ever to attempt to steal from advertisers by using bots to impersonate human smart-TV viewers, White Ops says.

Researchers at White Ops have uncovered what they described this week as the largest-ever ad fraud operation to date associated with connected TVs (CTVs). The so-called ICEBUCKET operation basically involved scammers using software bots to trick advertisers into thinking there were real people watching their ads on the other side of the smart TV screen. By using bots to impersonate human beings, the scammers fraudulently got advertisers to pay for ad impressions that were never actually viewed by a real person.

Michael Moran, a member of the detection team at White Ops, says it's unclear how much money advertisers might have lost to the ICEBUCKET scam. But at its peak, the bot operation impersonated more than 2 million people from over 30 countries. Some 99% of the spoofed IPs used in the campaign are located in the US, White Ops said. At one point nearly 28% of the CTV traffic that White Ops has visibility into in January — or some 1.9 billion ad requests per day — came from ICEBUCKET. The operation is still ongoing but at a substantially lower volume compared to January.

ICEBUCKET used virtual private servers within various data centers that appeared to be located on a small number of network segments in nine countries. "We postulate that they either purchased access to those servers or used lower security on those servers to insert their own code on the servers to run," Moran says. In its report on the operation, White Ops theorized that the ICEBUCKET attackers used those particular networks either because they were cheap, the network operators had lax security standards, or large number of systems hosted on those segments were vulnerable to attack.

According to the vendor, the operators of the ICEBUCKET scam also appeared to be making some extra revenue by delivering ad-fraud-as-a-service to many application publishers. "We've observed cases where such publishers are mixing up organic and ICEBUCKET traffic in what seems to be early signs of traffic sourcing schemes for CTV traffic," White Ops said in its report.

Digital ad fraud continues to cost advertisers billions of dollars annually. A large portion of the fraud is being enabled through the use of bots and botnets to impersonate human actions, such as clicking on an ad to boost page views.