Programmatic advertising is booming in most online media. In fact, it is grabbing more and more budget quotas within marketing and advertising agencies. Marketplaces are strongly committed to the automated buying and selling of advertising space and, according to data from IAB Europe, 67% of companies that advertise on the Internet consider that programmatic advertising is an essential tool in marketing.
In programmatic advertising, everything is decided based on algorithms that determine in which media the ads will appear. This means that advertisers do not pay to appear on a specific site, but rather to connect with a specific audience niche. But the results are not always as expected. Marketing experts have not stopped uncovering fraudulent plots such as the irruption of fake digital media in recent years.
Types of attacks targeting programmatic advertising
Domain spoofing is a bad practice carried out by some ad exchanges to get more ad spend from advertisers, making them believe that their ads are serving on legitimate domains when they are actually appearing on fraudulent or inappropriate web pages. Thus, an ad exchange could rewrite the domain it displays to its advertisers by masking the true URL with the domain it wants to spoof, so that DSPs cannot detect fraud.
Another real threat in the buying and selling of programmatic advertising is bots (software programs that perform automated tasks on a website without human intervention). In December 2016, we learned about the largest advertising fraud on record to date. It used a botnet of Russian origin and a system known as Methbot. This fraud meant millions in losses for companies, estimated at more than 180 million dollars. It is estimated that 20% of programmatic advertising spend does not reach end users but falls into the hands of bots that generate fraudulent impressions.
Domain spoofing are the biggest challenges facing programmatic advertising today. Fraudulent clicks and other such actions are minor problems compared to the losses caused by these practices, which is why they are not taken as seriously (not to say that they do not take them into account) as other techniques that generate much greater losses.
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