It’s An Advertising Jungle Out There. Protecting Brands from Ad Fraud

In the world of cybersecurity, experts are finding that both the demand and supply side of business requires greater protection from unsavory advertising environments and malicious advertising threats, eliminating digital risk while increasing ROI on ad-spend. 

To that end, CHEQ and RiskIQ formed a partnership that advances the industry, creates visibility and protects assets across the entire digital advertising supply chain, affording advertisers, platforms, and publishers a greater sense of security and control over their online presence.

Daniel Avital, Chief Strategy Officer, CHEQ noted, “The rise of ad fraud has become a major threat, with up to 30% of all online ads served to bots, rather than humans, and ad fraud costing $51million a day in 2018.” In addition, he asserts that “brands are increasingly facing the threat of their ads repeatedly being served against violent, graphics and offensive content, such as rape or terrorism significantly damaging their brands.”

Launching the first of its kind cybersecurity-based study for the ad industry (as opposed to traditional ad-verification companies from the ad-tech space), CHEQ, examined four billion ad requests from October 2018 to February 2019, and found the following:

• While just 18 percent of that online ad traffic was deemed fraudulent, 77% of it was considered “sophisticated invalid traffic” (SIVT).
• SIVT vastly outnumbers more basic forms of ad fraud “general invalid traffic” (GIVT). Therefore, CHEQ concludes that ad-fraud threat is much greater than many imagine.

To help analyze and combat this ad fraud, CHEQ realized the need to develop more than 700 unique parameters to block ad fraud in absolute real-time including the use of Dynamic Code Patching, OS and device fingerprinting, and honeypots (bot traps) performed on every single impression. Adding to this effort is the use of AI-based image recognition to help reduce brand safety concerns where ads are placed near videos or sites served in unsavory contexts (for instance graphic and offensive content).

“The use of AI and more robust cybersecurity techniques is vital in moving away from simplistic measures relied upon by the industry such as using blacklisted keywords, or in the case of ad fraud, buying static IP lists purchased from data centers covering only 3-5% of all fake traffic,” stated Avital, adding, “Using these latest advances we can prevent almost all fraud and brand safety issues in real time.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Military-Grade Ad Verification. Interview with Daniel Avital, CSO CHEQ

With all of the industry talk about ad verification, it may take a former Israeli intelligence officer to develop a military-grade protocol to detect and prevent ad fraud. 

CHEQ, founded by Guy Tytunovich, is positioning itself as “a cyber-security company looking to replace traditional ad-verification platforms with a fully autonomous and pre-emptive solution.” It is certainly an area of importance for agencies and advertisers who are concerned about brand safety, ad viewability and fraud prevention.

I sat down with CHEQ’s Chief Strategy Officer, Daniel Avital, to find out more:

Charlene Weisler: How does CHEQ prevent ad fraud?

Daniel Avital: Every time a user is about to be served an ad, our system rapidly analyzes almost 700 parameters and sets multiple honeypots (bot traps) to determine the authenticity of that user and ensure that only human traffic gets served. The name of the game is speed – after analyzing all of that data and making a decision, we need to prevent that impression from being acquired by our client. All of that needs to happen in record speed.

Charlene Weisler: Does it protect privacy?

Daniel Avital: Ultimately, our mission is to protect the digital ecosystem and privacy is a big part of that effort. To that end, we are fully compliant with the new GDPR regulations and have brought on board designated personnel to ensure that our privacy practices continue to be protective of user privacy, which we believe to be a basic right.

Charlene Weisler: How does CHEQ work in real time?

Daniel Avital: To enable real-time prevention, our engineering teams have had to continuously optimize our algorithms to ensure all our fraud prevention and brand-safety NLP (natural processing language) modules run simultaneously, cost-efficiently and at great speed. This allows CHEQ to make an accurate decision before an ad is ever served.

Charlene Weisler: Could it be said that it is in the programmatic space or works with programmatic in some form?

Daniel Avital: We cover all digital advertising environments, including programmatic, whether it be display or video - where we are introducing unique and cutting-edge capabilities to the industry.

Charlene Weisler: Can CHEQ be used for other media applications?

Daniel Avital: Absolutely. At this point in time, CHEQ’s focus is on transforming the ad-verification space (ad fraud, brands safety and viewability), but our ultimate goal is to help advertisers take back control of their digital media, a goal that transcends ad verification. Our R&D teams are developing exciting applications for our tech which will give advertisers new tools like Autonomous PR (crisis management, reacting to competitors, breaking stories).

Charlene Weisler: How does the technology work?

Daniel Avital: For fraud prevention, CHEQ's platform applies various proprietary modules to detect suspicious non-human activity, data discrepancies and behavioral anomalies. On the brand safety side, we apply advanced NLP (Natural Language Processing) modules to intelligently analyze content at page level and ensure advertisers only serve ads alongside brand-safe content.

Charlene Weisler: What advice would you give a digital advertiser?

Daniel Avital: Stress-test your ad-verification vendors and don’t blindly trust the accuracy of their measurement and reporting. Do not put up with a vendor who offers a “black-box” solution. Always ask them to provide you with raw data (flagged IP’s, flagged “unsafe” URL’s, traffic sources etc.) so that you can assess their work with an external party.

Charlene Weisler: Where do you see your part of the business going in the next 3-5 years?

Daniel Avital: We want to put the control back in the hands of advertisers. Today the hottest issues are brand safety, ad fraud and viewability but in the next few years we plan on transcending the verification space and launching innovative products which will help advertisers get an even stronger grip on their digital presence.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com