Massive Scallywag ad fraud campaign combated

BleepingComputer reports that the wide-reaching Scallywag ad fraud operation that generated up to 1.4 billion fake ad requests daily to monetize pirating and URL shortening websites had its operations nearly dismantled following efforts from bot and fraud detection company HUMAN, prompting most of its affiliates to join other scams.

HUMAN researchers were able to cut off 95% of the Scallywag fraud-as-a-service operation after tagging it as fraudulent following its discovery via elevated ad impression volume from WordPress sites, forced wait times, and cloaking behavior. Such an operation has been supported by the WordPress plugins Soralink, Yu Idea, and WPSafeLink, as well as the free Droplink extension. "These extensions lower the barrier to entry for a would-be threat actor who wants to monetize content that wouldn't generally be monetizable with advertising; indeed, several threat actors have published videos to coach others on setting up their own schemes," said HUMAN.