Must-read story out from WIRED about the Mirai botnet used for DDOS attacks. An interesting section of the story for ad tech folks... 💸 they also were working on click fraud! 🤯

https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-untold-story-three-young-hackers-web-killing-monster/ (no paywall for another day on this story!)

"They had only just launched this world-shaking creation. Now they already needed an exit strategy. It was Paras who, a day or two later, suggested a new idea. Their 'Russian' customer had, despite renting occasional access to Mirai, suggested to him that DDoS was a bad business. Not enough money. Far too noisy. He’d advised they instead consider partnering with him to use their botnet-building skills for a much stealthier and more lucrative opportunity: click fraud. Put all those hijacked machines to use quietly clicking on pay-per-click web ads instead of pummeling victims, Paras explained, and they could make tens of thousands of dollars a month by invisibly defrauding advertisers, a far less disruptive form of cybercrime. Josiah and Dalton agreed they should start to transition away from the cyberattack-for-hire industry and into this more respectable black-market business."
...
"As the months passed and they remained free, they made a brazen decision: They would continue their pivot into the click fraud scheme."
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"This new venture was turning out to be far more lucrative than Mirai, to a degree that even they had never imagined. To avoid ties to their overexposed botnet, they had begun building a new one, this time focused on devices primarily in the US, given that they could make the most money selling access to American computers to generate clicks on American ads. By the spring of 2017, they were quietly pulling in $50,000 a month in revenue, paid out in cryptocurrency by a business partner who seemed to be Eastern European."
...
"The FBI agent and prosecutor were intrigued to learn more about the key role played by Dalton, who hadn’t until then been a target of their investigation. And they were amazed to hear that the Mirai crew was now, even after their raids, engaged in an entirely new click fraud botnet scheme. They had known nothing about it."
...
"In fact, with plenty of time to prepare before they arrived, Dalton had physically destroyed all his most sensitive hard drives. The agents found his beloved water-cooled PC torn apart, its red coolant spilled across his bedroom floor like blood. He’d carefully cached another drive that stored all the bitcoins earned from their click fraud scheme inside a cat food container, fully hidden by kibble. Since the container was transparent, the searching agents didn’t think to look inside."