Russian government hackers have been all over the news lately regarding the hack by Vladimir Putin to influence the presidential election. What many people do not know about Russian hackers is that since this cyber-attack on the United States, independent hackers have been implementing the most successful cyber bot attack to ever exist. The target of these attacks have been on United States companies that advertise on the internet. The cyber bot is called Methbrowser, or Methbot for short. Methbot has caused United States media companies estimated 3 to 5 million dollars daily according to White Ops, the cyber security company that discovered the hackers.
These independent hackers created a bot that impersonates a human browsing the internet clicking on ads forcing media companies to pay for ads to be viewed with no chance of the ad resulting in a sale. The bot has become so advanced that it even pretends to browse fake accounts on social media platforms to prevent being detected by cyber security companies. According to WhiteOps, Methbot would view 400 million ads per day. This operation went on for two months before WhiteOps discovered the hackers.
White Ops believes that at this point the operation of Methbot is so large that it is embedded in the advertising ecosystem and will be very difficult to stop. White Ops has said, “To date White Ops has observed 250,267 distinct URLs across 6,111 distinct domains that were generated by Methbot in the act of impersonating a user visiting a web page” in their “The Methbot of Operation” press release. It is affecting the demand and the supply of the advertising market, making it difficult for companies to see the true success, or lack thereof, of the ads that companies are paying for. The cyber-attack has caused companies to lose data, money and time that has been spent on online advertising.
This issue raises a lot of questions as to how protected companies, people and our government are protected on the internet. Thanks to White Ops, this problem will eventually be resolved, but it has become clear that cyber security is an industry the United States needs to become stronger in. Although this attack is not related to the government or on United States citizens, it is a cyber-attack from a foreign country, and that is a scary thing. It is important for internet users to realize the danger of the internet and the importance of cyber security. These kinds of attacks are only going to become more often if we do not start to make changes to our cyber security. This means that individuals, companies and the United States government needs to become smarter on the internet. We need to become more educated on this topic to properly protect our country and the companies and people that reside in it from these kinds of attacks.
