December 20, 2022 By Threat Intelligence Team
This blog post was authored by Jérôme Segura
Online advertising is a multi billion dollar industry with projected spending to reach over 600 billion U.S. dollars for 2022. It's not surprising that criminals are trying their hardest to abuse this ecosystem in any way that they can.
One of the biggest threats and always top of mind for advertisers is bot traffic as it is the equivalent of throwing money down the drain with ads that will never be seen by real eye balls. However, ad fraud is more than bots and in fact, even when traffic is seemingly real, there can still be abuse.
Case in point, we came across a clever ad fraud scheme where a fraudster is running a cost-effective popunder campaign on high-traffic adult websites and then making money via Google Ads. What originally caught our attention was seeing a Google advert on what appeared to be an adult page, as it is strictly against the search giant's acceptable content policy. It turned out to be a clever way to hide a bogus blog loaded with many more ads, most of them hidden behind a fullscreen pornographic iframe.
