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The blockchain is at an early stage in the innovation process. Still, the energy industry is quite advanced compared to other industrial sectors as it sees considerable potential benefit from the blockchain, not only for the increased efficiency of existing processes but to support and accelerate the transformation of the energy towards more decentralized business models.

With the blockchain we experience a paradigm shift predicting an interesting reduction in the execution time of transactions, increasing operational efficiency by eliminating processes that need the human factor.

The implementation of the blockchain incorporates a greater coverage of agility, transparency and automation.

Today, the energy sector has already started to implement these models. Large corporations such as BP, have created a digital platform on Blockchain, with the aim of simplifying the management of the entire transaction chain of raw materials and petroleum products.

Peer-to-peer technology enables large volumes of transactions to be managed, which are processed quickly, safely and at a relatively low cost.Although many possible uses have been suggested, the true potential of blockchain advancement comes from myriad ways and it can help companies to make a profit.

The facilitator of a cross cutting ecosystem of information, shared by a number of different but interconnected parties. A critical element to the value of the blockchain is the ability to reduce the times of multilateral transactions to almost zero. Thus, it dramatically reduces the overhead costs of using intermediaries, such as clearing houses, allowing companies to be more efficient and profitable.

Finally, the blockchain can greatly improve trust in transactions between companies and people in the digital world, which in turn can reduce associated bureaucracies.

Blockchain-enabled systems provide companies with a tool to manage transactions, maintain their economic benefits, privacy and security, and reduce the costs of each one.

The table shows a detailed blockchain comparison with many of the standard data management approaches used by companies around the world.Eliminating intermediaries, monitoring the operation in real-time, verifying data and reducing the risk of fraud are very attractive benefits for both the energy sector and its customers.

The appearance of the Blockchain has come to be considered a key event in history such as the appearance of the first computer or the appearance of the internet in our lives.

The world of connected solutions is one of our greatest passions. The security of your valuable information is not going to be a barrier, so you only have to worry about continuing to work towards the success of all your exciting challenges.

In this sense, decentralization-based protocols for file sharing have the power to replace the cloud storage system. The Blockchain is the framework that facilitates not only the processing and recording of transactions and data, but also the coordination of connected devices.

The processing of all transactions that are carried out continuously in the hyper-connected environment of the Internet of Things cannot be covered if it is through distributed computing. This is because the peer-to-peer network system (the famous P2P) significantly reduces the maintenance costs of the data center. One can more detail at bitcoin revolution official site.

What Litecoin and Dogecoin are trying to do is that there is no professional mining but professional transaction verifiers that do not flee in terror when the monetary base of these currencies reach their maximum limit established in the initial design. Using scypt we make anyone with a PC competitive and the verifiers are more distributed than with SHA-256 based currencies.

The other difference between virtual currencies is the time between confirmations of transactions. In Bitcoin it is 10 minutes, making it sensitive to a double-spending attack (i.e. an attempt to spend the same money on two transactions). In Litecoin it is 2.5 minutes and in Dogecoin it is 1 minute, to give an example.

In the end, the important thing about a virtual currency is the volume of transactions and users, and in this aspect, Bitcoin wins long. This is similar to a social network. Creating one is relatively simple, achieving a significant number of users, not so much.

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Blockchain: The Most Awaited Ally For The Security Of The Internet Of Things - CoinCodex

Researchers have uncovered the biggest connected-TV (CTV) ad fraud operation theyve ever seen, fueled with fake ad views seen by bogus eyeballs that actually belonged to a bot network they named ICEBUCKET.

Bot-mitigation security firm White Ops said on Thursday that at its peak January 2020 the ICEBUCKET bot operation impersonated more than 2 million people in over 30 countries.

ICEBUCKET also cooked up 300 publishers out of thin air, then stole advertising dollars by tricking advertisers into thinking there were real people on the other side of the screen. Those were no humans: they were all bots, working to exploit the limited transparency of whats known as the server-side ad insertion (SSAI) platform for measuring video ad impressions.

With SSAI, ads are stitched into the fabric of video content so there are no delays or hiccups caused by launching an ad player. Its commonly used for advertising on several edge devices, such as CTVs, smart phones, gaming consoles and set-top boxes like Roku.

Besides the reduction in latency, advertisers benefit from the ability to target-market. Like plenty of Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets, TV streamed through the internet brings the ability to discern quite a lot about whos viewing it, enabling advertisers to target exactly the type of viewer they think is likely to buy whatever it is theyre selling.

But as White Ops tells it, SSAI is still in its infancy. The firm can see the fraudsters as they discover holes in the system and worm their way through. In the case of ICEBUCKET, theyve done it by spoofing edge devices to make them look like SSAI services.

Theyre sending out ad requests from data centers for those spoofed edge devices. Requests coming from data centers arent remarkable: thats how real SSAI providers do it. But rather than show ads to live humans, the fraudsters are simply calling the reporting APIs to indicate that the ad has been shown.

Theres not a lot of information available to advertisers in an SSAI environment. Its often limited to the device user-agent and IP address. Falsifying information in the HTTP headers is relatively simple, White Ops says. But what makes ICEBUCKET a sophisticated bot attack is the nuance of how its faking those headers.

The end result: advertisers are paying good money for humans to view their ads and, mind you, those are pricey ads to buy, given that targeted marketing going to very specific demographics of humans fetches premium ad dollars but theyre actually playing to home theaters devoid of actual audiences, White Ops says:

The ads that are served either never see the light of day or are never viewed by a human. An audience of sophisticated bots is really just an empty audience.

Using custom code and including standard HTTP headers, ICEBUCKET presented its traffic as coming from a legitimate SSAI provider for a variety of devices and apps. ICEBUCKET assembled requests for ads to be inserted into video content for viewers using CTV and mobile devices, but none of those devices or viewersactually exist. The operation largely used obsolete devices to pose as user-agents: ones that arent used much anymore or that never even existed in the first place.

White Ops says that the IP addresses look to have been algorithmically generated to mimic desirable audiences in other words, the audiences that advertisers pay top dollar to target ads at.

White Ops says that ICEBUCKET is the biggest SSAI spoofing operation thats ever been discovered. Near its peak in January, it accounted for nearly 28% of all programmatic CTV traffic that the firm could see. That translates to around 1.9 billion ad requests per day for the month of January, just from this one botnet.

Most of the programmatic traffic the firm saw going through the SSAI platform 66% was coming from the scheme, while 15% of the mobile ad programming came from ICEBUCKET. Besides mobile devices, the botnet was also working through set-top devices including Roku.

At 46%, Roku was the top device spoofed by ICEBUCKET. Others included Samsung Tizen Smart TV, Google TV (which Google discontinued in 2014) and Android. Roku, for one, confirmed that the impressions were spoofed. After White Ops informed the company about the scheme, Roku checked its internal systems and found that it wasnt showing any ICEBUCKET activity at all on its platform.

What makes ICEBUCKET unique and difficult to stop is that some of its traffic is being generated to benefit app publishers. In some cases, White Ops has seen publishers mix organic and ICEBUCKET traffic. Why? The firm has two hunches: it could be a way to hide the operation by creating obfuscating noise that makes it tough to identify the bogus traffic, with a subset of traffic not benefitting the operation directly, or it could point to fraud-as-a-service.

If it is fraud-as-a-service, the botnet operators are getting paid to generate traffic on behalf of the app publishers. The mix of fraudulent plus legit activity not only makes it harder to detect; it also generates more money for the scheme.

It could be that both of those options are in play, depending on what subset of the traffic youre looking at. But while White Ops cant conclusively determine what the point is of the mixed traffic, it knows one thing for sure: this operation is still going strong.

ICEBUCKET is anongoing operation. The volumes shown in [our illustrations] have not gone down to zero. The fraudsters are still out there, but we are able to execute our bot mitigation and bot prevention techniques to detect them and protect against their attacks; were disclosing this discovery now so others can do the same.

Original post:
Bot creates millions of fake eyeballs to rip off smart-TV advertisers - Naked Security