Tamer Hassan and 3ve
The story that follows plays out just like the classic tales of dragons and armor clad champions. After the dragon is slain the champion earns his title “Dragonslayer” or “Dragon’s Bane” and the whole community benefits from getting all their stolen treasure back. In this story, 3ve is the dragon (or hydra) and the head of the coalition formed to defeat her, Tamer Hassan, is the Champion.
Back in 2017 Hassan, the cofounder and then CTO of ad-fraud detection and prevention company White Ops, discovered a botnet that was growing exponentially despite conventional attempts to destroy it. A botnet is “the term for a network of private computers infected with malicious software and controlled by criminals without the owners’ knowledge”. In the case of advertising, a botnet creates fake websites and uses automated software to pose as real humans and simulate real traffic to websites created by the botnet to steal advertising dollars. 3ve used this model of ad-fraud and infected millions of residential computer systems all over the United States unbeknownst to their users.
Unchecked ad fraud is a death sentence to internet advertising and therefore, the end of free content on the web. Sites like Youtube pay their content creators with money generated from ads. If that system breaks down, it means no more free Google or Youtube. If it is only a robot clicking through the web page, the money spent on ads is wasted. Profit is stolen by the fraudster and worse yet, misleading data is generated. Data that encourages more spending on wholly ineffective advertising. Even worse yet, ad-fraud malware creates a platform for other types of cybercrime like identity theft, ransomware, spyware, and computer viruses.
Tamer Hassan couldn’t let this continue. A hero for well over a decade before taking his post at White Ops, he flew Pave Hawk helicopters as a combat search-and-rescue pilot for the Air Force in Afghanistan. A self taught coder from the age of 8, it’s been in his heart to help people with his expertise since before September 11, 2001. At the time of the attacks he was in engineering school at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. “I knew that I had to use everything I learned to protect others.” Help others he did. Parties that don’t normally work together like Google, and the FBI and over 20 other corporations collaborated for over 18 months with White Ops in this endeavor to reclaim the integrity of the internet.
This massive program was a leviathan among its peers. One of the largest botnets to have ever existed. “3ve was remarkably sophisticated,” added Tamer Hassan, CTO of White Ops. “It showed every indication of a well-organized engineering operation with best practices in software development. It exhibited reliability, resilience and scale, rivaling many state-of-the-art software architectures.”
It’s easy now to see why CAPTCHA exists. A CAPTCHA makes the user complete a task not easily done by a robot, thereby thwarting bots from taking advantage of traffic incentives. Jeff Beer, in his May 2019 article about what makes Tamer Hassan the most creative business person of 2019, summarizes White Ops’ foundational thesis so eloquently:
“…security should be about more than just building a wall to protect clients; it should work to make crime tougher and more expensive to pull off. This is why instead of simply asking a human to solve a captcha (typing numbers and letters to prove you’re not a robot — a tool that can be scammed at scale), White Ops created tech that interrogates a bot a thousand different ways, such as subtle timing differentials when code is executed that can reveal whether it’s being directed by human or machine.”
The architects of 3ve found a way around this though. 3ve designed fake websites that mimic popular websites like the New York Times or CNN. Running ads on a website that looks, on paper, like a high traffic website drives up the value of the ad space. The more visitors that go to a site, the more the ad space on that site costs.
The eventual take down of 3ve and its builders happened officially on October 22, 2018 when the FBI charged three of the eight alleged perpetrators. The other five are still at large.
Dismantling 3ve required the best players in cybersecurity to rise to meet a foe with unprecedented aggression and tact. Tamer Hassan played a lead roll defeating a botnet so massive and cunning, it threatened to destabilize the ad economy of the internet.
3ve is the type of villain you find in sci-fi stories. Many faced, wide reaching and powerful. 3ve was set up in such a way that made her difficult to destroy. When one head was cut off, another sprang up in another location. When one fraudulent tactic was discovered, there was another tactic left undiscovered. Every good story has a problem to be solved or a villain that needs to be vanquished. 3ve was the villain that great stories are made of and it brought its vanquishers on a great adventure. I think that’s what got Tamer Hassan to the top of Fast Company’s 100 most creative in 2019. He played a lead role in one of the greatest stories of the century.
