Zach Edwards

adexchanger.comIdentity Resolution Goes The Way Of The Cookie | AdExchangerSafari is tracking the trackers. Apple officially blocked identity resolution providers this week. Our guest, Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher and the co-founder of DecryptAds, puts the decisi...

It was an honor and a pleasure to speak with the team at @adexchanger.com for their Big Story podcast -- we covered Apple's recent announcement to block identity resolution providers and our recent report from @decryptads.bsky.social about AI recipe slop networks www.adexchanger.com/the-big-stor...

Zach Edwards reposted

Maggie Harrison Dupré

@mharrisondupre.bsky.social

NEW: A new report found ~2,100 AI slop recipe sites crowding the web with garbage -- including a website operated by a fake AI baker named "Elena" who is clearly designed to look like the very famous actress Emily Blunt futurism.com/artificial-i...

futurism.comRecipe Scammers Are Using an AI-Generated Emily Blunt as a Slop Puppet to Promote Their GarbageRecipe scammers are creating fake chefs and home cooks, including an AI-generated ripoff of the actress Emily Blunt.

Zach Edwards reposted

Futurism

@futurism.com

"It's all a lie."

trib.alRecipe Scammers Are Using an AI-Generated Emily Blunt as a Slop Puppet to Promote Their GarbageRecipe scammers are creating fake chefs and home cooks, including an AI-generated ripoff of the actress Emily Blunt.

Our team at @decryptads.bsky.social is out today with our first report, which we’ve been working on for months. The research is focused on AI slop recipe and cooking websites, the fake chefs who supposedly run them, and the Russian and Chinese ad tech companies integrated into the sites..🧵

adexchanger.comAI Slop Sites Are On The Rise. Is Ad Tech Ready For Its New MFA Challenge?DecryptAds uncovered more than 2,100 AI-generated recipe sites that are monetized with programmatic ads and feature fabricated author profiles.

Coverage of the research today by @adexchanger.com @ "AI Slop Sites Are On The Rise. Is Ad Tech Ready For Its New MFA Challenge?" @ www.adexchanger.com/programmatic...

An ode to AI Emily Blunt 🙃from @mharrisondupre.bsky.social @futurism.com "Recipe Scammers Are Using an AI-Generated Emily Blunt as a Slop Puppet to Promote Their Garbage" futurism.com/artificial-i... Big thank you to Futurism for all their work researching AI slop networks! 🖖

Any site using AI personas should have to disclose it and the sales houses monetizing them could require that tomorrow as part of KYC requirements. If ad tech doesn't start to police these AI slop publishers better, at some point government will surely step in...

decryptads.comdecryptads.com

Read our first research report from @DecryptAds @ "AI Recipe Slop Networks Are Being Monetized Through Russian and Chinese Ad Tech" @ decryptads.com/blog/posts/a... Ping me for any comments / questions / concerns / edits! thank you ⛈️ ⚖️ 🖖

As more publisher niches turn into AI slop factories and ad tech from Russia and China keeps getting integrated into these sites, there are real risks hiding in this noise. Are you reading a website from a nice guy who drinks white wine & eats plain bagels, or something else?⤵️

Enterprise advertisers we saw buying ads on these AI recipe sites include Adobe, HBO Max, Siemens, Subaru, Capital One and Pepsi. 👀 Zero notes on the "Mr Recipes" website and their alleged owner... (Adobe ad seen below) ⤵️

An ad system authorized in ads.txt can receive user data on every page load (IP address, device/UA, page you’re on) and bid on the impressions. If it wins, it makes money and serves an ad payload of its choice into that slot. None of that is guaranteed on a given visit...

citizenlab.caExposing AdFection: How Discover-Tech Turned Targeted Ads Into a Pipeline for Zero-Click Mercenary Spyware - The Citizen LabThis is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Ca...

Last week @citizenlab.ca and Confiant showed that targeted banner ads were recently used to deliver zero-click spyware to targeted individuals. (citizenlab.ca/research/how...) (blog.confiant.com/p/adint-weap...) Delivering malicious zero click payloads over ad tech is a real threat.

– dailytastekitchen[.]com served a ClickFix malware lure styled as a Cloudflare check for over a week. When we first found this ClickFix domain in our scanner data it had zero detections in VirusTotal...🥺

Nearly every one of these publishers outsources their ads.txt to a sales house. hbagency[.]it manages 1,631 of the sites (77%) and ezoic[.]ai another 407 (19%).

– recipemaestro[.]com took a newspaper photo of a real chef holding a pie and swapped only the face. Its social account is in Algeria. The picture below has an AI face... and the X account alleges the owner is based in Algeria..

– Fake “culinary teams” of up to six AI chefs, résumés citing Le Cordon Bleu and the Culinary Institute of America, with no indication any detail is true.

We filtered for cooking sites and manually confirmed AI authorship (AI photos plus AI text, three pages per site), leaving ~400 sites. Then we built 190+ technical fingerprints in DecryptAds to expand that to 2,100+ MFA domains and now we track new sites as they come online.

The report has dozens of examples of the deception on these sites, including: – addcakes[.]com appears to use AI-edited photos of actor Emily Blunt as “Elena,” a busy mom who loves baking. Its X account is in Morocco. Once you see these Emily Blunt AI photos you can’t unsee them.

futurism.comGoogle Updates Guidelines to Punish Sites That Use Fake Bylines and AI-Generated HeadshotsGoogle has updated its guidelines to forbid the use of fake bylines, AI-generated headshots, and other acts of "deception."

Two weeks ago Google updated their search policies to penalize publishers who use “deceptive authorship information,” a positive step for slowing down AI slop websites. (futurism.com/artificial-i...) But far more needs to be done... like where is the @FTC ?

Our research started with the ~300 ad systems we track from risky geographies (Russia, China, secrecy havens, other elevated-risk jurisdictions) and the publishers authorizing any of these orgs within ads.txt programmatic advertising files.

Read our new research "AI Recipe Slop Networks Are Being Monetized Through Russian and Chinese Ad Tech" @ decryptads.com/blog/posts/a... // We explain our process for hunting the original 400 recipe domains working with risky ad tech & expanded to 2,100+ domains through 190+ pivots...

krebsonsecurity.com/2026/10/feds... New research from Brian Krebs which indicates that the recently arrested 54-year-old cybersecurity executive was deeply in the loop on recent ShinyHunters attacks... and his former business partner also had odd ties to threat actors...

Even though I have strong feelings™ about Flock I tried to keep it professional and stay focused on them becoming a CVE Numbering Authority in my comments alongside the brilliant @k8em0.bsky.social in this recent piece from @cyberscoop.bsky.social @ cyberscoop.com/flock-cve-nu...

There are over 21k publishers on Google's Blogspot who have programmatic advertising ads.txt + app-ads.txt files (many low quality apps host legal/ad tech files here). Pivoting by seller name associated w/ low density accountIDs used by those sites shows owner cohorts, via @decryptads.bsky.social

mcp.decryptads.commcp.decryptads.com

Data parsed via the DecryptAds MCP (mcp.decryptads.com) from @ decryptads.com/search/publi...