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Group Session: Malvertising : How To Detect and Deal With Malicious Ads

Group Session: Malvertising : How To Detect and Deal With Malicious Ads. Mike Nolet admonsters Ad Ops 360 July 17 th 2008. What are “Malvertisements”?. Malware Ads, or “Malvertisements”, when displayed attempt to install spyware or adware or otherwise hijack a user’s browsing session

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Group Session: Malvertising : How To Detect and Deal With Malicious Ads

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  1. Group Session: Malvertising: How To Detect and Deal With Malicious Ads Mike Nolet admonsters Ad Ops 360 July 17th 2008

  2. What are “Malvertisements”? • Malware Ads, or “Malvertisements”, when displayed attempt to install spyware or adware or otherwise hijack a user’s browsing session • Often ads are built upon legitimate ads from legitimate vendors • In other cases, entirely fake marketing campaigns, complete with functional sites, are setup as fronts for buying ad-inventory • Affecting publishers from the long tail to the top – Yahoo, MSN, AOL have all been caught showing malware ads

  3. Why you should care • Do you want your users to see this when they come to one of your properties? • Not to mention that recently passed legislation could potentially hold publishers liable for malware ads shown on their sites

  4. Examples • Some examples of legitimate advertisements that were modified to install malware:

  5. Examples • An example fake website setup as a front for an online marketing campaign that served entirely for malware:

  6. Examples • Tags with fake serving domain to appear like an agency adserving system:

  7. How to Prevent Malware Ads • Use Common Sense On Direct Buyers • Who is the buyer? Does he have a known reputation? • Could this buyer realistically have a relationship with this advertiser? • Is the offer just too good to be true? Pre-pays, high CPMs, International focus • Check Malware sites – (msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks & mikeonads.com) • When Dealing with Ad-Network • Don’t work with a network whose reputation you don’t know • Don’t place tags that contain too many redirects • Make sure your ad-networks are educated and aware of the various scams that have come up

  8. How to Find Malware Ads • What do you do if you receive a user complaint? • Ask for as much technical information as the user can give: screenshots, source URLs, page source • Find out the browser, timezone, country and IP address of the user • Do not push them away and assume that it is the user’s fault – angry users result in bad publicity and complaints with federal agencies, law enforcement and online advocacy groups • Try to emulate that user on your own property • Use public proxy servers to emulate foreign IP addresses • Install a tool such as Firefox’s “Tamper Data” to sniff URLs and look for suspicious behavior.

  9. Useful Links • My Blog: http://www.mikeonads.com/ • Spyware Sucks Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/ • Tamper Data FireFox Plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/966 • Fiddler Debugging Tool: http://www.fiddlertool.com/

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