Research Brief:

Operation Fingerprint

Overview:

This paper is the result of several months of researching and monitoring malvertising campaigns that we have observed affect thousands of publishers and dozens of ad networks. The goal of this research is to summarize some of the malvertising campaigns we have seen and give numbers to quantify their impact. While some of those incidents have ceased, others are still ongoing and the threat actors responsible for them are very successful at bypassing most ad quality and security checks.

Highlights:

Hundreds of goo.gl URLs used in malicious redirections
Over 100 fake advertiser domains
Dozens of ad networks abused, including top ones
Use of SSL to encrypt ad call URL and content
Targeted towards genuine residential IP addresses only
Booby-trapped GIF images hiding code with on-the-fly encoding
Fake advertiser profiles and deceiving websites
42% of infections happened in the U.S.
Cost: only 19 cents for each 1000 impressions (CPM)

Free download

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