Top all-time · #5877
HUMAN Security
Company blog · whiteops.com/blogsecurity
HUMAN Security is the company blog at whiteops.com, writing about security. Since 2014, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “3ve: Global Ad Fraud Bot Net Discovered by DOJ and Google”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link White Ops (later HUMAN Security) for its ad-fraud and bot-detection research, including the Methbot report and the botfraud study. Commenters cite it as a source on fake ad traffic and bot detection.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
HUMAN ensures that every digital interaction, from interacting with a digital ad to completing an online transaction is authentic, secure, and human.
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-07
- 3ve: Global Ad Fraud Bot Net Discovered by DOJ and Google2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-11-27
- METHBOT2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-21
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-11
What Hacker News says?
Brave's bitcoin integration is under the hood, only exposed in beta but it'll be hidden. Our long-term play is to build the anti-Google, your personal data platform. Ad networks have not "gone too far" -- the whole system is broken, with malware entering 3rd party ad exchanges and fake users browsing fake publisher sites to steal ad revenue ( https://whiteops.com/methbot ). Google facilitates and profits from all of…
Comment linking /methbot
on “Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless”Submitted METHBOT as a story · 7 points
HN discussionWhiteOps | Product Managers / Threat Intelligence / Threat Research | On Site NYC and remote (US, UK, EU) | Full-time | https://www.whiteops.com/ Product Managers with Digital Advertising Ecosystem, CyberSecurity / Cloud Security Product Experience. Threat Intelligence, Threat Research folks. What do we do? Building the world's best human verification platform. Disrupting the profit centers of cybercrime. Solving en…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2021)”Submitted 3ve: Global Ad Fraud Bot Net Discovered by DOJ and Google as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAdvertisers already do this, but part of the report claims that Methbot spoofs common domains. They provide a sample here: http://www.whiteops.com/methbot/domains.txt
Comment linking /methbot/domains.txt
on “Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views”Submitted Inside The Largest Connected TV Bot Attack as a story · 2 points
HN discussionForum post from Dan Kaminsky, co-founder of WhiteOps[1][2]: "Dan Kaminsky here, my apologies for kicking up a ruckus. This is part of a bot detection framework I've built at White Ops; we basically are able to detect browser automation using resources exposed in JavaScript. Nothing dangerous to users -- or we'd go file bugs on it, which we do from time to time -- but it does provide useful data regarding post-exploi…
Comment linking /company
on “The New York Times uses WebRTC to gather local IP addresses”Submitted The Hunt for 3ve as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA whois on the domain serving the offending javascript leads to White Ops[0], who seems to sell tools to protect against Ad Fraud. So I'm guessing this is part of their fingerprinting system, to determine whether I am a human or a bot. [0] http://www.whiteops.com/
Comment linking /
on “The New York Times uses WebRTC to gather local IP addresses”Submitted MethBot – World's Most Profitable Digital Criminal Activity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhile it's indeed used for "ad tracking", this snippet is actually closer to a white-hat tool. This is from Integral Ad Science https://integralads.com/ which attempts to detect ad fraud. If you hate ads, it won't matter, but in the fight to make ads less invasive, potentially more useful, and still viable as an economic model for those who want to participate with it, Integral and WhiteOps ( https://www.whiteops.co…
Comment linking /
on “Browser Fingerprinting: An Introduction and the Challenges Ahead”WhiteOps is working on ad-fraud detection: http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/tag/whiteops/ & http://www.whiteops.com/
Comment linking /
on “Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets”Heh, I'm one of the authors of the report. You can pick it up at http://whiteops.com/botfraud .
Comment linking /botfraud
on “Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds”It looks like this is related to 'bot detection' services from http://www.whiteops.com/ , as White Ops is listed as the contact on tagsrvcs.com. The html served back includes a script tag having require(['http://static01.nyt.com/bi/js/tagx/tagx.js'], function () { http://static01.nyt.com/bi/js/tagx/tagx.js loads http://s.tagsrvcs.com/2/818492/analytics.js?<bunch of query params> which defines an 'encryption key' tha…
Comment linking /
on “WebRTC being used on nytimes.com to report visitors' local IP addresses”