DUBLIN — AdSecure has released its first Security Violations Report, with the debut study covering Q1 2019.
According to the company, which provides ad verification solutions used by ad networks, ad operations teams and publishers, it analyzed more than 200,000 ad campaigns across multiple regions, devices and browsers for its partners between Jan. 1 and March 31.
These findings provide insights into cybercriminal behavior during Q1: Where they were most prolific, how they delivered their attacks, their malicious weapons of choice, and what AdSecure’s detections revealed in order to stop and protect end users from malicious ads. The report looks at the top 10 geos with security violations and the top five geos with violation breakdowns.
The report shows that browser lockers were by far the biggest violation from a volume perspective, so AdSecure looked globally at which browsers cybercriminals used to target their Browser Locker activity on desktop and mobile.
“The biggest threat in Q1 2019 was clearly browser lockers, including push Lockers, a new variation on this threat, distributed by bad actors who exploit a flaw in the push notifications opt-in process,” said AdSecure’s Product Manager Mat Derval. “AdSecure was able to detect a massive amount of those attacks because our crawler is powered by modern browser technology, which is crucial in order to catch the latest versions or mutations of threats.”
“We detected this new trend at the end of Q4 2018,” Derval explained, “and we were able to release a major update to our crawler at the beginning of Q1 2019 to protect our clients and partners.”
“This security violations report is the first of what will be an ongoing, quarterly analysis on the always evolving world of digital risk,” AdSecure Sales Manager Bryan Taylor noted. “In the future, we will compare current quarterly data with past reports to take a look at how digital ad attacks change over time, where improvements can be found Q on Q, and what new threats are rising in popularity.”
“We look forward to providing both our partners and all stakeholders within the digital advertising ecosystem, with insights that will help them build a safer digital world,” Taylor added. “For everyone.”
The full report is available here.