Intruder sends threatening and ransom letters to website owners and users of the Google AdSense advertising service.
Unknowns threaten to generate fake banner views with the help of bots and thus provoke blocking the site, reports KrebsOnSecurity website.
[box]“Very soon you will receive a warning notification in the control panel of your AdSense account! We are going to invade your site with a huge amount of direct web traffic generated by bots with a 100% bounce rate and thousands of IP addresses – a nightmare for any AdSense user. We’ll configure our bots to open every AdSense banner that runs on your site in an endless cycle of varying lengths,” said the message from the attackers. An increase in traffic due to fake activity threatens site owners by setting a limit on showing ads and returning income to the advertiser, as well as completely bGoogle defines invalid traffic as “clicks or impressions generated by publishers clicking their own live ads,” as well as “automated clicking tools or traffic sources”[/box]In one case, the criminals demanded $5,000 in bitcoins and began to carry out their threats – the amount of invalid AdSense traffic on one of the users’s resources has increased significantly over the past month.
“The reader who shared this email said while he considered the message likely to be a baseless threat, a review of his recent AdSense traffic statistics showed that detections in his “AdSense invalid traffic report” from the past month had increased substantially”, – reports Brian Krebs.
Google said it has extensive tools and processes to protect against invalid traffic across its products, and that the most suspicious traffic is filtered from its systems before advertisers and publishers are ever impacted.
Additionally, Google urged users to ignore any messages demanding a ransom, as well as report such cases to company representatives.
Perhaps this is a false alarm: better read the study on the methods of the ransomware operator REvil (Sodinokibi) – they definitely have something to brag about.
