3ve

Over a year before the FBI brought down 3ve’s human creators, the ad industry rolled out ads.txt, an anti-domain spoofing standard that slowly throttled the botnet. 3ve visited spoofed domains and sold fake traffic to publishers and, when it was active, was responsible for 1% to 2% of all bid requests, according to Google product […]

Until now, if an ad fraud scam was uncovered, the criminals behind it would usually fade back into the shadows with impunity, and shortly thereafter, they’d be back at it again – the seemingly eternal game of Whac-A-Mole. This time, there’s accountability. Two global botnets, Methbot and 3ve, are no more, and there are real people […]