Confiant Safeguards Over 25 Billion Programmatic Monthly Impressions from Malvertising

USA - English

• USA - English

NEW YORK, Aug. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Confiant, the cyber security company that protects publishers' and platforms' reputations, revenues and resources, today announced it has reached a new milestone in malware detection and blocking: Protecting more than 25 billion programmatic impressions from malvertising and fraudulent impressions across over 2,200 sites in July. This unprecedented growth is fueled by rapid expansion and adoption of Confiant's 2nd generation real-time ad verification solution for publishers across new customers with marked increases in premium publisher partners such as Tribune Media, Internet Brands, Vice Media, Peopleconnect, Inc. and Topix. Confiant now counts more than 10 percent of comScore's top 100 publishers as customers.

"Our explosive growth is proof that preventing more attacks is the single-most important end goal of every Publisher and Platform ad ops team," said Louis-David Mangin, CEO and Co-Founder, Confiant. "Our first mover advantage from having launched our real-time verification technology a year ago has given us a unique position in the market, allowing Confiant to confront the criminals abusing the industry and provide customers the highest level of protection from malicious redirect and fraudulent IBV impressions."

Confiant detects and prevents advanced threats that regularly bypass other security solutions. Its patent-pending real-time ad verification technology stops attacks before they can ever execute and adapts to new threat types in real time to stop criminals from hijacking digital advertising. With its advanced threat detection technology safeguarding more than 25 billion impressions per month, Confiant has unique visibility into the attack landscape. Reviewing its second quarter data, Confiant found that 1 out of every 200 (0.5 percent) open market programmatic impressions were malicious redirects attacking users, and an additional 3 out of 200 (1.5 percent) were fraudulent in-banner video (IBV) impressions where the publisher's display inventory was being misrepresented to video advertisers. Confiant is the first to actively measure these issues, providing its publishers actionable insights on how to get the upstream parties to stop facilitating nefarious behaviors.

Confiant pinpoints June 11, 2018 as the single-worst malware redirect attack in a day. The attack lasted for more than 7.5 hours, and Confiant blocked approximately 650,000 malicious impressions per hour.

"June 11 saw our real time blocking rates peak at over 3x our quarterly average of 0.5 percent. These type of volumes are in no way trivial given their potential revenue impact and deleterious effect on user experience," Mangin added. "More than a quarter of our publisher clients were affected by just this one attack."

The attack accounted for over 8 percent of the impacted Tier 1 ad exchange's daily traffic and for eight hours. Thirty-three percent of all 320x50 impressions from this exchange were affected, with some publishers seeing spikes of up to 70 percent. The malvertisers were primarily targeting U.S. audiences on both iOS (66 percent) and Android (34 percent), and are estimated to have impacted 1.84 percent of the US traffic on sites not protected by Confiant.

"Malware distributors have become increasingly savvy at finding the weak spots in the programmatic value chain, therefore monitoring and blocking malvertising in real-time with Confiant allows us to further develop our ad stack without compromising user experience. Our commitment to quality is our highest priority," said Nicole Goksel, Senior Director Revenue Operations at Tribune Media.

About Confiant

Confiant is a cyber security company born from the recognition that the world's most sophisticated advertisers aren't Verizon or P&G, but criminals using the industry for their own selfish ends. These criminals are hijacking programmatic advertising and giving publishers a bad name.

Confiant protects publishers' and platforms' reputations, revenue, and resources with always-on anti-malware software that provides protection for desktop, mobile, and video ads. Our sole focus is on helping advertising platforms and publishers rid the world of malware. This focus enables us to evolve quickly and meet our clients' needs for defeating the bad actors trying to undermine the industry.

It is the first company to come to market with a technology that not only detects malicious activity, but actively blocks it. Confiant believes in the intelligent application of this new technology to fight back and make digital media safe for everyone.

SOURCE Confiant