Close
  • Latest News
  • Cybersecurity
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
Read Down
Sign in
Close
Welcome!Log into your account
Forgot your password?
Read Down
Password recovery
Recover your password
Close
Search
Menu
eWEEK.com
Search
eWEEK.com
  • Latest News
  • Cybersecurity
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
More
    Home Cybersecurity
    • Cybersecurity

    White Ops Raises $20M to Enhance Tech to Fight Online Ad Fraud

    By
    SEAN MICHAEL KERNER
    -
    September 19, 2016
    Share
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Linkedin
      online advertising fraud

      White Ops announced Sept. 19 that it received $20 million in a Series B round of funding, which is earmarked for helping the company continue to expand its security platform for the online advertising industry, including investment in engineering as well as go-to-market efforts.

      Total funding to date for the company now stands at $33 million, with investments from Paladin Capital Group and Grotech Ventures.

      White Ops’ two product platforms, Fraud Sensor and MediaGuard, are focused on helping reduce the risk of online adverting fraud. In January, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and White Ops issued a report that estimated $7.2 billion will be lost to online advertising fraud in 2016.

      “Our mission is to break the central profit centers of cyber-crime,” Michael Tiffany, CEO and co-founder at White Ops, told eWEEK. “We’re focused on the incentive models, the idea being that we can make everyday internet users more secure if we make it less profitable for hackers to compromise them in the first place.”

      Online advertising, particularly advertising fraud, has become a top money maker for cyber-criminals, he said. With advertising fraud, advertisers pay for advertisements to be served and they end up being served to bots, rather than real consumers.

      If there is malware running on a consumer’s device, the malware could also read the user’s cookies, Tiffany explained.

      “What botnet operators are selling are visits by the ton,” Tiffany said. “So a botnet operator that has compromised machines will offer buyers millions of unique visitors per day.”

      The buyers of botnet traffic are aiming to increase the volume of visits to a given website or mobile app. The increased traffic, in turn, creates more advertising opportunities or potential inventory for advertisements to run.

      “The bot traffic doesn’t look like an anonymous bot horde, it looks like verifiable humans,”
 Tiffany said.

      White Ops operates a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) endpoint that performs malware detection, he explained. White Ops malware detection technology is embedded into online advertisements and provides advertisers and advertising platforms with some visibility into potentially fraudulent page views.

      “Our malware detection code rides along in an advertisement as a third-party ad call,” Tiffany said. “That gives us distribution across a massive number of ads that are served across the internet.”

      The White Ops code determines if the advertisement that is being displayed is being served to a real human or a malware-driven browser.

      White Ops uses a number of different methods to stay ahead of advertising fraud botnet operators. As such, even if a botnet had some form of JavaScript detection engine looking for White Ops code, the company has multiple techniques beyond just JavaScript to validate advertising delivery, Tiffany said.

      A key challenge for the online advertising industry is the growing use of ad-blockers by consumers, which is actually serving to help advertising fraud.

      “The effect of ad blocking is that it constrains the supply of advertising opportunities,” Tiffany said. “What we’re seeing now in the early days of this issue unfolding is that as supply is constrained, that actually is creating greater demand for botnet traffic to fill in the gap.”

      Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

      MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

      Android

      Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro: Durability for Tough...

      CHRIS PREIMESBERGER - December 5, 2020 0
      Have you ever dropped your phone, winced and felt the pain as it hit the sidewalk? Either the screen splintered like a windshield being...
      Read more
      Cloud

      Why Data Security Will Face Even Harsher...

      CHRIS PREIMESBERGER - December 1, 2020 0
      Who would know more about details of the hacking process than an actual former career hacker? And who wants to understand all they can...
      Read more
      Cybersecurity

      How Veritas Is Shining a Light Into...

      EWEEK EDITORS - September 25, 2020 0
      Protecting data has always been one of the most important tasks in all of IT, yet as more companies become data companies at the...
      Read more
      Big Data and Analytics

      How NVIDIA A100 Station Brings Data Center...

      ZEUS KERRAVALA - November 18, 2020 0
      There’s little debate that graphics processor unit manufacturer NVIDIA is the de facto standard when it comes to providing silicon to power machine learning...
      Read more
      Apple

      Why iPhone 12 Pro Makes Sense for...

      WAYNE RASH - November 26, 2020 0
      If you’ve been watching the Apple commercials for the past three weeks, you already know what the company thinks will happen if you buy...
      Read more
      eWeek


      Contact Us | About | Sitemap

      Facebook
      Linkedin
      RSS
      Twitter
      Youtube

      Property of TechnologyAdvice.
      Terms of Service | Privacy Notice | Advertise | California - Do Not Sell My Info

      © 2020 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

      Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.

      ×