Brand Safety

Protecting Our Clients From Botnets

TubeMogul takes proactive measures to protect brand advertisers from the fraudulent video ad practices of botnets.

A botnet is a network of computers infected with a virus programmed to visit specific sites to artificially inflate their traffic – and the number of ads they can sell. Some botnets are additionally able to contaminate the audience data advertisers use to target ads by visiting sites where companies are known to collect demographic and behavioral data, such as a blog for expecting mothers.

To combat botnets, TubeMogul created “Operation Clear Sky,” an initiative that has a dedicated team of data scientists and engineers. The Clear Sky team created a model to identify fraud in video ad auction data, such as an abnormal use of proxies, among other signals. TubeMogul also works with partners that use different approaches to vet inventory.

Data from Clear Sky shows that botnets are more sophisticated than has been previously reported. By using proxies, for instance, the Blog bot botnet can make one hijacked computer appear to be hundreds and even thousands of viewers.

– Operation Clear Sky in Action –

TubeMogul was able to identify and blacklist three major botnets at the root of fraudulent activity:

Protecting Our Clients From Masked URLs and Nested iFrames

TubeMogul takes proactive measures to ensure our clients’ ads are not served on sites they did not intend to buy.

Mismatched or ‘masked’ URLs and nested iFrames are two types of fraud that can result in advertisers buying a specific site via auction, but having the ad delivered on a different site than intended. The practice is extremely sophisticated and is employed most commonly by sites that pirate legitimate content to create video ad impressions.

We employ the following measures to ensure your campaigns and our inventory is protected:

1. Pre-bid referrer detection to unmask embedded iFrames
2. Page domain detection to confirm the URL being bought will be the one the ad actually delivers on
3. Supply-side partners pass back domain and iFrame information for every auction available for confirmation before bidding

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