Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

Post by ChuckMcM » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #256

ChuckMcM wrote: post #253

From the article -- which will see more than $20 billion stolen this year. Think about the number in that article for a minute, $20 BILLION dollars "stolen" last YEAR. How many places are there in the world where you can steal over a billion dollars from them, and they won't hunt you down and kill your family? A nation-state? Nope they will send their intelligence service after you. A drug cartel? Don't even get me s…

Keep in mind that it’s primarily the publishers that are hurt by this. Advertisers typically determine what they’re willing to spend on inventory based on the ROI, which is decreased by ad fraud. As such, the inventory of “genuine” publishers is devalued as well. Note that in this sense, a publisher can be both a powerhouse like FB or Google, or also smaller outlets.

Post by manigandham » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:23 PM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #262

manigandham wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adtech companies know exactly who is responsible. Every ad on any serious network is approved before going live. Every single auction is logged, that's just basic tracking and necessary for billing anyway. The problem is that there are no serious consequences in this industry. Ad fraud isn't a technical problem, it's a business problem, one that most companies are not incentivized to solve or prevent.

This is overlooking the problem of detecting that people are doing something malicious. There is a fairly large variety of unwanted behavior, both by the advertisements, and by the sites or apps hosting the ads.

Post by darkpuma » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:33 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #251

darkpuma wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should in fact practice television avoidance. It's an awful format in just about every sense. You should not begin listening to more radio to compensate. Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate. Something movie trailers, television, and radio all have in common is the coercive use of music to manipulate how you feel, particularly when trying to persuade you to buy something or vote for somebod…

Ok, maybe television wasn't the best example of my point. Let me give a different example. Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers? You mentioned adblockers but obviously that's not feasible for television, so for the purposes of the hypothetical, assume that adblocking on the web isn't feasible either. Would you stop usin…

Post by nitwit005 » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:22 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #263

nitwit005 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is overlooking the problem of detecting that people are doing something malicious. There is a fairly large variety of unwanted behavior, both by the advertisements, and by the sites or apps hosting the ads.

That's covered under "no consequences". You don't need fancy tech, most of the malicious behavior comes from a limited set of bad actors and vectors. It's just not stopped because nobody cares to.

Post by manigandham » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #267

manigandham wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's covered under "no consequences". You don't need fancy tech, most of the malicious behavior comes from a limited set of bad actors and vectors. It's just not stopped because nobody cares to.

Sorry, but you genuinely do need fancy tech to detect it. There are multiple businesses that do nothing but that, plus teams at most of the big ad tech companies. You may notice this article cites Protected Media and DoubleVerify. You can't manually audit that kind of traffic volume. Several of the ad tech companies have pressed law enforcement to prosecute some of these people, but mostly unsuccessfully. They're oft…