We have heard that Russian hacking caused Hillary Clinton the election for the last few weeks. But some surmise that pushing this narrative was done expressly to sway electors. Now that the vote is behind us – perhaps the Russian hacking that really deserves media attention is Methbot – a clever solution where hackers purchased blocks of IP addresses – making them appear to be in the U.S. and using Chrome on Macbooks to watch videos. It most recently stole $180 million dollars from advertisers and obviously hurt media companies who compete with such fake traffic.

White Ops is the cybersecurity company which found the operation… “This is a very advanced cyber operation on a scale no one’s seen before,” said Eddie Schwartz, the company’s chief operating officer. And the scale is indeed scary as the criminals purchased half a million IP addresses! Wow. this resulted in 300 million fake views – double wow.

The challenge for companies fighting this sort of fraud is the cloud – as hackers can lease as many computers as they want to simulate human activity. It will continue to be a cat and mouse game of hacker and white hat hacker – with the stakes getting seemingly larger with each hack.