Ad fraud
How fraud works in online advertising, who operates it, who profits, and what it costs.
27 essays, 2014–2018.
Essays27
- Big publishers a safe-haven for advertisers. Fact or fiction?
One of the hottest myths surrounding inventory quality and trust issues is that big publishers provide a safe-haven to advertisers. This argument is not popular just with big publishers…
- WTF is adToken?! A Primer to Ad Network 2.0 Schemes
It’s the first of a kind, but not in an exciting or positive sense. Actually, it just marks the beginning of an era where ad networks (at least for a while) will be interesting and seem…
- Internet on Ad Fraud – Prelude
TL;DR We conducted a scan of 50,000 websites, where we picked the sites based on how much ad inventory the site is making available in ad exchanges.
- Pixalate’s Secret War on Xindi Botnet (Intro) — Full. Spectrum. Goddamn. Cyber.
On 18th of November Mediapost, an advertising industry mouthpiece wrote a story on Pixalate’s findings and the alleged Xindi botnet costing companies $3 billion by end of 2016.
- Anti Ad Fraud Company’s Guide to Countering Facepalm
TL;DR What we have in ad fraud research, is companies that are not equipped or incentivized to invest in to serious research, and media that does not know what to believe and what to…
- Dark Side of Google – Ad Fraud
TL;DR Google is the biggest company in the world and makes 90% of its money from online ads. Google’s ad revenues are based on commissions it receives from ad buys on its system.
- This Is Why We Cant Have Nice Things
Banner ads are the advertising version of toxic waste. Advertising is a form of waste in itself: - people waste their attention and in some rare case money - advertisers waste their money…
- Impact of Invalid Traffic on Vendor Profitability
Invalid traffic (ad fraud) have not been discussed in the context of vendor profitability before.
- Entropy and Invalid Traffic Detection
For the past 16 months we have worked on analyzing daily ad exchange bid logs with the goal of creating a “signals intelligence” scoring mechanism that could handle 200 billion bid events…
- If DDoS attacks trigger ads, does it mean the attacker is the target?
But wait, if DDoS attacks can trigger ads on the target site, and sites make money from ads (and mostly only ads), whose the target? TL;DR Yes.
- Announcing the Advertising Technology Wall of Facepalm
As a community-led initiative curated by botlab.io, we are today announcing Adtech Wall of Facepalm in response to the ignorance and corruption in the internet advertising industry, largely…
- Eight Ad Fraud Predictions Nobody in Adtech Wants to Make — part 1
2015 was the first year when the advertising industry started to widely talk about ad fraud.
- Eight Ad Fraud Predictions Nobody in Adtech Wants to Make — part 2
2015 was the first year when the advertising industry started to widely talk about ad fraud.
- WTF is Going on with Ad Fraud?!
Ad fraud is the biggest cybercrime, making a whopping $10 billion or more for cybercriminals this year, causing damages in hundreds of billions of dollars to society.
- RESEARCHER: Here is the Fight Against Ad Fraud > #JOINFAST #GG
If you’re working as a security researcher, you must have heard about how cybercriminals use advertising networks to make billions of dollars per year.
- DIRECT_BUY_POISONING: How Data Spam Leaves Transactions Vulnerable to Fraud
Audience data, both 1st and 3rd-party, have so far not been discussed as a concern in the fight against ad fraud.
- Ad Fraud Does Matter, Rick Webb
This post is in response to Rick Webb’s irresponsible, emotional and mistaken commentary on how the advertising industry should not care about ad fraud and just let the 1 cybercrime be as…
- Golden Age of Windows XP Based Botnets Just Started
In the below announcement Microsoft steps down from providing support for Windows XP. This announcement was initially made in early 2014…
- Botlab patch #1: block AWS IP ranges entirely
Advertising that is delivered to Amazon instances are non-human traffic 100% of the cases and pose a real threat to the integrity of investments advertisers, investors and suppliers are…
- “How About Ad Fraud Barry Adams?”
While we were at San Sebastian with botlab.io comrades for the I-COM Global Summit, I had the chance to talk with one of the hottest adtech and data execs out of APAC. Barry Adams from…
- Six Kinds of Perpetrators
hobbyist are computer enthusiasts who are generally interested in hacking things. They don’t have malicious intent and they are generally not interested with making money.
- ad fraud expose: digital media supply chain like you’ve never seen before
Huge thanks to Ciaran and ExchangeWire for having me over for this demo/interview.
- Understanding the Four Kinds of Online Advertising Fraud
The recent coverage on the topic of advertising fraud has been very much focused on one aspect of the problem. In the above model this particular kind of activity is referred to as “Zombie”…
- How Large is the Online Advertising Fraud Problem?
For the sake of this article, we have two ways for attempting to answer the question about the total size of the ad fraud market.
- Online Advertising Fraud: Who Is Operating It?
Regardless of the model, when we go down to level of individuals operating anddeveloping systems, the profile of the individual is more or less the same.
- Online Advertising Fraud: Why You Have to Read the ANA / White Ops Report
If you work in media, you should read the ANA / White Ops Fraud paper on bot-activity and online advertising fraud.
- Why CAPTCHA is Not a Viable Solution for Dealing with Online Advertising Fraud?
According to Solve Media 4 out of 5 web visitors from certain countries are not human traffic. The countries topping the ranks are Estonia (83%), Singapore (79%) and China (77%).