We at Adsterra are doing our best to provide safety to our partners, and we think that you deserve to know more about our efforts to create and maintain a secure environment.
Bad actors in the digital advertising world are smart, sophisticated, and sometimes pretty hard to catch. They keep on inventing new methods and tactics of malvertising, and as soon as the threat is detected, they switch to a new one. A popular tactic of fraudsters is to launch campaigns during weekends and public holidays when most of the people enjoy their time off. That’s why we always have to be on the lookout and continuously keep tracking new and running ads. This is when the software enters the stage and does it work to keep the ecosystem safe.
Here is a review of the security tools we use to adapt quickly to the always-changing world of digital advertising security.
GeoEdge
GeoEdge protects publishers from malicious and harmful ads in the programmatic ecosystem. They monitor our ad inventory 24/7 to detect and block any malicious activity and quality issues in real-time, long before any damage can occur. Thanks to GeoEdge, only clean ads are served to publishers, and it saves the end-users from security or quality threats.
AdSecure
We continue to strengthen the partnership and cooperation with AdSecure: the combination of two systems helped us to increase malware detection by almost 100%. AdSecure is an intelligent defense against malvertising. They provide a full range of defense and security tools for ad networks and publishers, constant campaign monitoring and threat reports.
AdSecure helps us detect such dangerous threats like malicious and phishing URLs, malware downloads, crypto-jacking, scareware, browser lockers and many others.
By the way, they have a great blog about malvertising, check it out if you are interested in the topic.
Custom solutions
Even though our partners provide great security tools, the ecosystem needs more safety solutions. This is why we have a full in-house developed security inventory that is subject to constant changes and improvements due to fraudsters’ nonstop activity, which doesn’t give a rest to the IT Dept :). They keep on analyzing flaws, investigating new malware patterns and developing the security system.
The system is based on knowing standard bot activity and identification of new fraudulent patterns. It helps us create custom bot traps, improve our scoring system, automate reactive response and prevent future attacks. Custom tools protect our partners from fraud, bot traffic, mining, phishing URLs and other dangerous threats to maintain positive customer experience with us.
Manual check
Even though we use the top-of-the-art software, unfortunately, not all threats can be prevented automatically; this is why the Adsterra Policy Team takes shifts to have 24/7 access to the control panel. The team provides manual checks with the help of proxy servers with different types of variable IPs that help us to pass cloaking systems of varying difficulty. And if there is no other way to deal with a problem, we use carrier/device/OS emulators as a last resort.