Pixalate Week in Review: January 28

This week's review of ad fraud and quality in the digital advertising space.

1. Pixalate releases Q3 2018 programmatic Seller Trust Indexes

Pixalate has released the Q3 2018 rankings for the Global Seller Trust (GSTI), Mobile Seller Trust (MSTI), and Video Seller Trust (VSTI) programmatic Seller Trust Indexes.

2. OTT webinar recap: Quality remains top challenge as market rapidly grows

Pixalate, the world’s leading cross-platform ad fraud solution — and the only company accredited by the MRC to detect and filter invalid traffic in Connected TV/OTT — recently concluded an expert webinar: “How to Succeed with High Quality OTT in 2019.”

This blog post recaps the key takeaways from the event, from market forces driving OTT adoption to potential roadblocks and what’s being done to overcome those challenges.

3. A guide to knowing different types of ad fraud

"Cracking down on digital ad fraud may seem like a hopeless and expensive game of whack-a-mole, but there are ways marketers and publishers can arm themselves better to fight it," wrote Digiday in an educational piece outlining various types of ad fraud, including GIVT vs. SIVT, domain spoofing, data-center traffic, fake device IDs, and more.

4. IoT botnet used in YouTube video ad fraud scheme

"The security research team at American ISP CenturyLink have discovered that an IoT botnet is proxying traffic for an YouTube video ad fraud scheme," reported ZDNet. "Researchers made this discovery while investigating an IoT botnet known as TheMoon, which they initially began tracking after observing several CenturyLink devices performing credential brute-force attacks against popular websites," the article added.

5. Flash player update is actually adware targeting Mac users

TechGenix has reported on a "bogus Flash Player update [that] target[ed] millions of Mac users with adware." The article explains: "How the campaign operates is by hiding the malware in such a way that it is thought to be a Flash Player update. The Mac user clicks on the image (which is an advertisement) and is then tricked into being redirected to the download page of the Shlayer malware (shown as the Flash update)."