10 Terrifying Ad Fraud Attacks That Will Kill Your Campaigns

10 TERRIFYING
AD FRAUD ATTACKS
THAT WILL KILL
YOUR CAMPAIGNS

Staying alive and competitive in the “cut-throat” digital advertising landscape is
often a lot like navigating a haunted graveyard. Threats lurking in the shadows
will ambush your digital advertising campaigns at every turn. You are constantly
vulnerable to sudden, unwanted surprises if you let your guard down for even a
moment. And you can clearly see the results of those who came before you—and
well, didn’t quite make it out alive.
You don’t want to end up like them, so you need to invest in the right tools and
equipment that will keep your campaigns safe and protected from threats (and
things that go bump in the night). Read ahead to get a sneak peak at some of
their malicious tactics aimed at murdering your digital advertising campaigns
for money, mischief or competitive advantage.
THINK GHOSTS, GHOULS AND ZOMBIES ARE SCARY?
Try Competitors, Fraudsters, And Cyber Attackers.
(Oh My!)
10 Terrifying Fraud Attacks That Will Kill Your Campaign
© QuanticMind Inc., All rights reserved
don’t get too comfortable. Just because you’re not paranoid
Doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
1

1. ATTACK OF THE BOTS
Like an army of robots, cybercriminals and fraudsters leverage botnets
– armies of compromised computers or infected cloud servers – to
overpower victims on a massive scale for their own personal gain.
Both powerful and strategic, this army employs any number of attacks
designed to illegitimately boost revenue targets, CPC or audiences
– with tactics like impersonating sites and fabricating inventory.
With any number of critical components of the ad delivery chain
compromised, advertisers are guaranteed to lose their customer base
– and subsequently revenues – to this dark army.
The Solution: Investing in a tool with botnet protection will go a long
way to keep this army at bay.
2

2. SPOO-OOKY GHOST SITES
Haunted mansions might seem abandoned and deserted, until you
look around and start noticing all the spooks that seem to suddenly
appear out of thin air. The same applies to ghost advertising sites,
where fraudsters build fake websites designed to host programmatic
ad platforms. When ads are posted on these ghastly sites, malware
executes click fraud, fake audiences or impressions, and other
nefarious activities, all of which give the fraudsters a nice payday
based on the cost per click (CPC). Needless to say, this funnels revenue
and conversions away from legitimate advertisers, who see their
profits slowly dying at these haunted sites.
The Solution: A tool with anti-spoofing technology will detect when
there’s a haunted image in your likeness.
3

3. ARMIES OF FAKE USERS
Walk around a graveyard at night, and you’ll soon discover that
you’re not alone. Similarly, you don’t have to look too far amid
your digital ad campaigns to realize that users are more common
than you might think—they just might not be, well, alive. With a
combination of bots, malware, click or app install farms, fraudsters
regularly leverage mobile apps to imitate human activity with the
goal of creating large audiences of fake users that build upon the
established advertising ecosystem. During this ploy, legitimate
advertisers are tricked into believing that an enormous number of
real users clicked their ads. In reality, however, their ads never reach
actual audiences, resulting in faulty and unreliable consumer data
that might mean missing their revenue targets.
The Solution: Investing in a trusted third-party platform containing
ad verification technology, will prevent fake users that will lower
engagement and brand conversions.
4

4. HIJACKERS ATTACK ADS
Few things are more terrifying than being taken hostage. In the case
of hijacked attacks, malicious actors can appear when you least
expect them, even on your digital advertising campaigns. During
these attacks, malware hijacks the ad slot on a website. While the
ad is clearly displayed, malicious code diverts revenues to the
attacker, not the publisher, via a user’s compromised computer,
a publisher’s compromised website or a compromised user’s proxy
server or router. For advertiser victims, this attack represents a
significant loss of revenue—and one that they likely won’t be able
to retrieve any time soon.
The Solution: Employing a third-party platform with ad monitoring
and fraud prevention technologies.
5

5. THERE’S A GHOST IN THE ADS
Now you see it...now you don’t. While impressions are still able to be
seen, this type of attack makes any ad invisible on the website—and
makes you feel like you’re losing your sanity in the process. Advertisers,
of course, lose out on clicks and revenue impacting their profitability
and bottom line. So you better look fast to make sure it’s there before
it vanishes like a ghost into thin air.
The Solution: A third-party platform with analytics capabilities can
show actual ad impressions and weed out fraudulent ads that drain
revenue and ad spend.
6

6. HIJACKERS STEAL CLICKS
When it comes to ad fraud, hijackers notoriously apply their same
sneaky tactics to all aspects of digital advertising. As with hijacked
ads, the attacker redirects the user to another website by taking
over a user’s computer or publisher’s website in order to steal their
click—and potential advertising customer. For digital advertisers, this
represents a major loss of revenue that is almost sure to skew their
data and cause them to fall short of their advertising goals.
The Solution: A tool complete with automated click-fraud prevention
will ensure that every click is true blue.
7

7. THE INVISIBLE IMPRESSION THIEF
For digital advertisers, few things are worse than a ghostly spook absconding
with your impressions, and ultimately, your clicks. In an impression laundering/
stealing attack, the unassuming advertiser carefully selects a publisher aligning
with their brand and message. From there, they buy an ad, only to have part of the
ad impressions served on a fraudulent website where neither the audience nor
the content aligns with the advertiser’s interests or brand. Yet through a series of
clever redirects and malicious iframes, the advertiser only sees the legitimate site,
instead of the fraudulent site that is actually displaying the ad. If loss of brand for
the advertisers wasn’t enough, seeing a site that doesn’t exist will only add to the
abject fear and paranoia.
The Solution: In addition to adopting an anti-fraud solution, investing in a tool
that accurately analyzes clicks, conversion and retention rates, for an accurate
picture of ROI.
8

8. MASKED URLS
From Freddy Kruger to scary clowns, masked villains are especially terrifying—
because you never know what they’re going to do next or what new surprises are
in store. As its name suggests, this attack masks a website’s actual URL address
in the bidstream, hiding the website on which it will appear. Needless to say,
that makes it a lot more challenging for advertisers to see what they’re actually
getting when they place their ad dollars. Cyber villains have no qualms about
misrepresenting their site as being more legitimate, audience-specific or credible
than it actually is (and it might very well be none of those things)—and then,
of course, overcharging CPC rates to gouge unsuspecting advertisers. In fact,
often this technique is aimed at tricking advertisers into running ads on sites
with stolen, or otherwise unsavory content—or rather, sites that aren’t exactly a
magnet for premium advertising. Advertisers need to do their homework, or risk
damage to brand and bleeding their advertising spend with very little ROI.
The Solution: Investing in a platform with ad security or anti-fraud
technology, with dedicated features designed to uncover hidden URLs.
9

9. GHOSTLY ATTRIBUTION MANIPULATION
Who moved that glass? Where is that music coming from? That book wasn’t
here just a minute ago. Like a poltergeist that moves household items
around behind your back, making you feel like you’re either crazy or seeing
things, attribution manipulation malware mysteriously sends clicks, and
in-app events for installs that never actually took place. These invisible
attackers also game attribution models and falsely take credit for user
in-app engagement. And they have one main purpose -- to falsely create
clicks on CPC-based ads, which they execute either by click injection or
click spamming. The advertisers, however, are left scratching their heads
wondering where all these clicks came from – and how they’re going to
explain their quarterly metrics.
The Solution: Look to a rule-based mobile fraud prevention technology to
ensure that you’re firmly in control of all attribution data.
10

10. SDK GETS SPOOFED
Heh heh, the joke’s on you! In this attack, fraudsters add code in one (attack)
app, which then sends simulated clicks, fake install and conversion signals
on behalf of the advertiser’s—or victim’s—app. By faking conversions, tricksters
laugh all the way to the bank, (and they’re the only ones laughing, trust us)
while duping advertisers into potentially paying for hundreds of thousands
of installs that didn’t actually take place. Advertisers will not be laughing,
however, when it comes time to report bottom-line profits.
The Solution: An anti-fraud tool that blocks SDK spoofing bots will help ensure
you’re dealing only with actual clicks and conversions.
11

Once upon a time, ad fraud was frequently downplayed and overlooked as
a business inconvenience. Now, ad fraud is rampant and at an all-time high.
According to a Juniper Research Report sourced to SE Journal, the advertising
industry is losing $51 million per day due to ad fraud, projected to total upwards
of $19 billion in wasted ad spend by the end of this year. That is a lot.
Although attackers are constantly sharpening their knives, evolving and refining
their tactics in search of their next victim, there are ways you can reduce the
chance that you’ll fall prey to their malicious ad fraud schemes.
In addition to providing superior bid-management, granular customer data
insights and analysis, and customized campaign management, QuanticMind
provides a platform well-equipped with anti-fraud and security technologies,
offering an additional layer of security and protection so ROI remains intact and
your campaigns remain as lucrative and profitable as possible. Because
we don’t want the bad guys to win either.
So who yA GONNA call?
www.quanticmind.com
(ADVERTISING) FRAUD-BUSTERS

10 Terrifying Ad Fraud Attacks That Will Kill Your Campaigns

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