Hi, I'm Marian Levy.

Welcome to Cyberism's malicious life. In the last episode of our show we heard a story of Methbot, an army of hundreds of thousands of bots programmatically viewing thousands of advertisements on thousands of

websites in order to siphon away millions of dollars worth of ad revenue

The scheme was picked up by a security firm and then the FBI earning a hefty jail sentence for one Russian

national Alexander Zukoff and some of his colleagues. But even the giant meth bot scam was just a drop in the ocean, that is ad fraud.

Putting Zukov in jail made hardly any difference at all, because of how many other people

just like him are still out there today?

What makes ad fraud so successful and so prevalent and why can't we stop it?

The answer isn't technical at all.

It's not hard to understand.

But it's a harsh reality that many people are simply not willing to face.

Cyber criminals use all sorts of methods to defraud advertisers.

But often in the end, it's quite simple.

Individuals and other low-level actors can use stacking,

placing multiple ads on top of one another, or pixel stuffing,

squeezing an ad into even just one pixel on a computer screen.

In each case, you're effectively registering an ad without actually having to show it to the user.

One method of maliciousness we're all familiar with is pop-up Windows.

Websites can rack in profits while annoying you and providing no value to the advertiser,

since you're almost certainly just going to close the window as soon as you noticed it. If you want to defraud major corporations, you figure

the bar is probably going to be a little higher. Methbot created a ghost army of fake users,

fitted with their own locations, browser histories,

...