SAFEGUARD AGAINST MALVERTISING

Malvertising—the use of online advertising to install malware—has become an increasingly popular distribution vector for fraudsters. They use malware to steal users’ personal data, such as login credentials and credit card information, and/or to compromise users’ machines to host contraband data, engage in distributed denial of service attacks, and perpetrate click fraud.

Syndication—a common practice, which allows ad networks to sell their inventory to one or more other ad networks—forces networks to rely on one another to screen and remove malicious ads. So if an attacker successfully places a malvertisement in one network, that ad may be routed to a different ad network and reach yet more publisher sites. By analyzing each ad event as it happens, Anchor helps syndication networks identify and remove malvertisements before they can turn innocent users into unsuspecting victims.