Streaming TV Fraudsters Steal Millions of Ad Dollars in ‘ICEBUCKET’ Attack

guest · Apr 17, 2020

Streaming TV Fraudsters Steal Millions of Ad Dollars in ‘ICEBUCKET’ Attack
Crooks manipulated connected TV supply-side ad platforms to create millions of fictional eyeballs
April 16, 2020
https://threatpost.com/icebucket-streaming-tv-fraudsters-steal-ad-dollars/154852/

A massive television ad fraud campaign that abuses the programmatic advertising ecosystem for connected TV (CTV) has successfully impersonated more than 2 million people in over 30 countries so far during its run, defrauding more than 300 different brands out of their ad dollars.

The recently uncovered CTV operation — named ICEBUCKET by the researchers at White Ops that discovered it – was bent on tricking advertisers into thinking there were real people watching TV on the other side of the screen, when in reality, they were bots pretending to be real people watching TV. In other words, the sellers of the ad inventory were bot-herders; and, they received money in exchange for running the ads – but the ads didn’t actually reach any human eyeballs.

Further, the fraudsters masqueraded as a range of streaming devices, including pretending to be people using Roku devices (46 percent); Samsung Tizen Smart TVs (27 percent); GoogleTV, which was discontinued in 2014 (21 percent); and Android mobile devices (6 percent).
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White Ops: Giving Fraudsters the Cold Shoulder: Inside the Largest Connected TV Bot Attack

The White Ops Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team recently uncovered the largest and widest Connected TV (CTV) related fraud operation to date.

The ICEBUCKET operation presented its traffic as coming from a legitimate SSAI provider (based on the inclusion of standard HTTP headers) for a variety of devices and apps, using custom code. ICEBUCKET assembled requests for ads to be inserted into video content for viewers using CTV and mobile devices, but none of those devices or viewers actually exist.

These ad requests originated from a small set of Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs).
The ICEBUCKET operation is unique in that a subset of the traffic is being generated to benefit app publishers directly through direct deals.
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Streaming TV Fraudsters Steal Millions of Ad Dollars in ‘ICEBUCKET’ Attack

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