Emerging Email Extortion Scams Threaten to Cut off Ad Revenue for Publishers

By Scott Ikeda for CPO Magazine
Wednesday, March 4, 2020

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The email extortion scamsters could simply scale down their demands, but they would quickly hit a point at which hiring humans (at a “click farm” or something similar) to assist would be cost-prohibitive. They would depend entirely on access to a substantial botnet combined with advanced methods capable of fooling Google, which would narrow the pool of potential perpetrators down considerably.

Though it is highly likely that whoever is currently perpetrating these email extortion scams is blowing hot air, this method is far from impossible. Ilia Kolochenko, Founder & CEO of web security company ImmuniWeb, has some advice for publishers who display AdSense ads and are concerned about this scheme: “Deploying a web application firewall (WAF), enhanced with a bot filtering system, may considerably reduce the risks of falling victim to this emerging vector of digital blackmailing.” Read Full Article