{"id":212045,"date":"2025-04-22T02:12:43","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T07:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/wordpress-ad-fraud-plugins-generated-1-4-billion-ad-requests-per-day"},"modified":"2025-04-22T02:12:43","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T07:12:43","slug":"wordpress-ad-fraud-plugins-generated-1-4-billion-ad-requests-per-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/wordpress-ad-fraud-plugins-generated-1-4-billion-ad-requests-per-day","title":{"rendered":"WordPress ad-fraud plugins generated 1.4 billion ad requests per day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/wordpress-sad-fraud-plugins-generated-1-4-billion-sad-requests-per-day.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A large-scale ad fraud operation called \u2018Scallywag\u2019 is monetizing pirating and URL shortening sites through specially crafted WordPress plugins that generate billions of daily fraudulent requests.<\/p>\n<p>Scallywag was uncovered by bot and fraud detection firm HUMAN, which mapped a network of 407 domains supporting the operation that peaked at 1.4 billion fraudulent ad requests per day.<\/p>\n<p>HUMAN\u2019s efforts to block and report Scallywag traffic have resulted in its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.humansecurity.com\/learn\/blog\/satori-disruption-scallywag\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">shrinking by 95%<\/a>, although the threat actors have shown resilience by rotating domains and moving to other monetization models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A large-scale ad fraud operation called \u2018Scallywag\u2019 is monetizing pirating and URL shortening sites through specially crafted WordPress plugins that generate billions of daily fraudulent requests. Scallywag was uncovered by bot and fraud detection firm HUMAN, which mapped a network of 407 domains supporting the operation that peaked at 1.4 billion fraudulent ad requests per [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}