They actually got some of this article wrong. These guys didn't create 6,000 domains. They spoofed 6,000 different premium domains in the referer that they se

They actually got some of this article wrong. These guys didn't create 6,000 domains. They spoofed 6,000 different premium domains in the referer that they sent to the ad networks. A list of the fake referrers they had their bot send is here [1] and the domains are here [2]. They didn't own these domains; they simply told their bot to use one of the 250K or so URLs on one of these 6K premium domains (including domains like nbc.com, nytimes.com, etc) as the referrer, which is set by the browser. The more concerning part is that it didn't raise any red flags on the ad exchanges that some random corporation was getting paid to display ads on nbc.com and nytimes.com etc. That part makes no sense to me. They also managed to purchase blocks of IPV4 addresses in the names of major residential ISPs such as Comcast. That part had to be an inside job. [1] http://methbot.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/URLs.txt http://methbot.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/URLs.txt [2] http://methbot.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/domains.txt http://methbot.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/domains.tx...